William Carlos Williams Quotes

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.

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

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

Empty pockets make empty heads.

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

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that.

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

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.

That which is possible is inevitable.

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

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.

A poem is a small machine made out of words.

Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Your knees are a southern breeze.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

At our age the imagination across the sorry facts lifts us to make roses stand before thorns. Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse— at least, blinded by the light, young love is. But we are older, I to love and you to be loved, we have, no matter how, by our wills survived to keep the jeweled prize always at our finger tips. We will it so and so it is past all accident.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses — The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end — of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits.

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 new music is a new mind.

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

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

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

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.

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

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

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

History must stay open, it is all humanity.

I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.

The poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient.... When asked, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.

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

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

You have the chicken, the hen, and the rooster. The chicken goes with the hen So who is having sex with the rooster?

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

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.

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.

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

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 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

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

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

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?