William Carlos Williams Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from William Carlos Williams on Wise Famous Quotes.
To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.
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!
The pure products of America
go crazy ...
... [] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
go crazy ...
... [] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
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.
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?
There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
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.
We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.
It's the anarchy of poverty
delights me, the old
yellow wooden house indented
among the new brick tenements
delights me, the old
yellow wooden house indented
among the new brick tenements
We, in
that instant, lost,
breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.
that instant, lost,
breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.
It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.
And this moral? As with the deformed Aesop, morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds.
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
The Hurricane
The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You
have your heaven,
it said, go to it.
The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You
have your heaven,
it said, go to it.
The past above, the future below
and the present pouring down: the roar,
the roar of the present, a speech
is, of necessity, my sole concern.
and the present pouring down: the roar,
the roar of the present, a speech
is, of necessity, my sole concern.
As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.
You lethargic, waiting upon me,
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.
The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.
By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast - a cold wind.
There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.
We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness
My first poem was a bolt from the blue ... it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the beginning is assuredly
the end- since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.
the end- since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.
In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.
It's a strange courage
you give me ancient star:
Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part!
you give me ancient star:
Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part!
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 ... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.