William Carlos Williams Quotes

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned

Rot dead marigolds- an acre at a time! Gold are you?

When I am alone I am happy.

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.

The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.

Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.

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 perfect man of action, is the suicide.

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

Through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones.

The pure products of America
go crazy ...
... [] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Nothing whips my blood like verse.

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.

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.

Empty pockets make empty heads.

So most of my life has been lived in hell.

It's just a moment, we die every night.

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.

History must stay open, it is all humanity.

But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden

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

A new world is only a new mind.

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

It's the anarchy of poverty
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.

Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect?

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

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

And this moral? As with the deformed Aesop, morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds.

If there is progress then there is a novel.

The noiseless wheels of my car
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.

A house is sometimes wine. It is sometimes more than a skin.

beauty' is related not to 'loveliness' but to a state in which reality plays a part.

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.

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

You're a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?

You lethargic, waiting upon me,
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.

Death will be late to bring us aid

What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.

The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.

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

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

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

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

We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.

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.

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

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

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

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

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

If they give you lined paper, write the other way.

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

He was always on the point of 'going away', where it didn't seem to matter ...

Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell.

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.

The set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way.

That which is possible is inevitable.

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.

All to no end save beauty
the eternal
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful

Say it! No ideas but in things.

For the beginning is assuredly
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.

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

It's a strange courage
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.

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 poet thinks with his poem...

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

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

To hell with everything I myself have ever written.

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