William Carlos Williams quotes:

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  • Sunshine of late afternoon-- On the glass tray a glass pitcher, the tumbler turned down, by which a key is lying--And the immaculate white bed

  • Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.

  • But the seawhich no one tendsis also a garden

  • It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements

  • Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind - But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested - the snow is covered with broken seed husks and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty.

  • Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.

  • Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.

  • Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.

  • In summer, the song sings itself.

  • The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

  • Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.

  • The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.

  • O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.

  • Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.

  • Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.

  • THESE are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night.

  • One thing I am convinced more and more is true, and that is this: The only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.

  • The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.

  • No wreaths please - especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes - a few books perhaps.

  • The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned

  • A new music is a new mind.

  • It was the love of love, the love of swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of natural, of people, of animals, a love ingengering gentleness and goodness that moved meand that I saw in you

  • We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.

  • A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

  • It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.

  • The HurricaneThe tree lay downon the garage roof and stretched, You have your heaven, it said, go to it.

  • I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.

  • What power has love but forgiveness?In other wordsby its interventionwhat has been donecan be undone.What good is it otherwise~?

  • [History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.

  • A new world is only a new mind.

  • A poem is a small machine made out of words.

  • A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.

  • A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.

  • Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

  • all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful

  • All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.

  • Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again

  • and there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away.

  • And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom-- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind.

  • As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

  • As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world

  • Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.

  • But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.

  • But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.

  • But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

  • By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.

  • By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast - a cold wind.

  • Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

  • Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.

  • Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

  • Death will be late to bring us aid

  • Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.

  • Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.

  • Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.

  • Empty pockets make empty heads.

  • Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

  • First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don't see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place - not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere.

  • For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

  • For there is a wind or a ghost of wind in all books echoing the life there, a high wind that fills the tubes of the ear until we think we hear a wind, actual.

  • For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.

  • Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly - to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut your grief in?

  • History must stay open, it is all humanity.

  • History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.

  • Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!

  • I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.

  • I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.

  • I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

  • I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way

  • I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my poetry.

  • I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage!

  • I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artists unless one should scour the world you have the ground sense necessary.

  • If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

  • If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

  • I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

  • Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

  • It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.

  • It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

  • It is difficult to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

  • It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.

  • It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.

  • It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!

  • Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. - through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

  • Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.

  • Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge

  • Love is that common tone shall raise his fiery head and sound his note.

  • Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.

  • Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realise his wishes- Now that he can realise them, he must either change them or perish

  • Minds like beds always made up (more stony than a shore) unwilling or unable.

  • Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them

  • My first poem was a bolt from the blue â?¦ it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. â?¦ it filled me with soul satisfying joy

  • My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.

  • No ideas but in things.

  • No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.

  • Nothing whips my blood like verse.

  • O frost bitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches. Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine. The twigs conspire against you! Hear hem! They hold you from behind.

  • One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken.

  • Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr.

  • Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

  • Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact â?¦ the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

  • Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.

  • Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.

  • Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.

  • Say it, no ideas but in things - nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident - split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained - secret - into the body of the light!

  • Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.

  • So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field.

  • so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

  • so much depends upon a red wheel barrow

  • Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year.

  • Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse-- at least, blinded by the light, young love is.

  • That which is possible is inevitable.

  • The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of

  • The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.

  • The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.

  • The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless-unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew.

  • The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

  • The Moon, the dried weeds and the Pleiades - Seven feet tall the dark, dried weed stalks make a part of the night a red lace on the milky blue sky

  • The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.

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