Top 100 William Carlos Williams Quotes
#1. Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.
William Carlos Williams
#2. The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through the layers of demoded words and shapes.
William Carlos Williams
#7. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#13. Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.
William Carlos Williams
#14. You lethargic, waiting upon me,
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.
William Carlos Williams
#16. You're a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?
William Carlos Williams
#17. For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.
William Carlos Williams
#18. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#19. We, in
that instant, lost,
breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.
William Carlos Williams
#24. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#26. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#27. 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!
William Carlos Williams
#28. 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
William Carlos Williams
#29. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#30. What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.
William Carlos Williams
#32. O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.
William Carlos Williams
#35. My surface is myself.
Under which
to witness, youth is
buried. Roots?
Everybody has roots.
William Carlos Williams
#36. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#41. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#42. We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
William Carlos Williams
#43. 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
William Carlos Williams
#44. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#45. It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams
#46. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#48. [History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
William Carlos Williams
#50. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#51. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#53. The pure products of America
go crazy ...
... [] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
William Carlos Williams
#54. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#55. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#60. There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.
William Carlos Williams
#62. After some years of varied experience with the bodies of the rich and the poor a man finds little to distinguish between them, bulks them as one and bases his working judgements on other matters.
William Carlos Williams
#67. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#68. It was too strong in the air.
I had no rest against that
springtime!
The pounding of the hoofs on the
raw sods
stayed with me half through the night.
I awoke smiling but tired.
William Carlos Williams
#69. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#70. Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness
William Carlos Williams
#71. There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#72. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#74. The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
William Carlos Williams
#75. You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.
William Carlos Williams
#76. Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
William Carlos Williams
#78. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#83. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#84. Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact ... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.
William Carlos Williams
#85. The Hurricane
The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You
have your heaven,
it said, go to it.
William Carlos Williams
#86. 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!
William Carlos Williams
#87. You have the chicken, the hen, and the rooster. The chicken goes with the hen So who is having sex with the rooster?
William Carlos Williams
#91. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#92. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#94. 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?
William Carlos Williams
#96. It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.
William Carlos Williams
#99. I had sent [the magazine] a batch of poems which they turned down flat. I was furious. Floss [my wife] said, 'If I were the editor of that magazine *I* would turn down what *you* sent.' So *she* picked a batch and they accepted them *all*.
William Carlos Williams
#100. Filth and vermin though they shock the over-nice are imperfections of the flesh closely related in the just imagination of the poet to excessive cleanliness.
William Carlos Williams
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