William Carlos Williams Quotes

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.

The pure products of America go crazy--mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.

What power has love but forgiveness?

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.

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

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.

THE THOUGHTFUL LOVER Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it. But it will keep—or it is not worth the having. Never start anything you can't finish— However do not lose faith because you are starved! She loves you she says. Believe it —tomorrow. But today the particulars of poetry that difficult art require your whole attention.

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.

In summer, the song sings itself.

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

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

The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?

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

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?

A new world is only a new mind.

Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!

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

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!

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.

There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.

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

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

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

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

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.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

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

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.

A poem is a small machine made of words.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.

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 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.

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.

Death will be too late to bring us aid.

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.

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

But the sea which no one tends is also a garden

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 what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.

No ideas but in things.

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.

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