Top 100 Quotes About William Carlos Williams
#1. William Carlos Williams, late in his long life, had a dream: He saw an enormous spiral staircase in empty space, and his father slowly descending toward him. When he reached the bottom, his father walked over, looked him in the eye and said: "You know those poems you're writing? They're no good."
Eliot Weinberger
#2. From a literary standpoint, I've been loving Raymond Carver's short stories, William Carlos Williams' poems, Richard Siken's 'Crush', John Fante, and Jim Harrison's book of ghazals. I love film and photography too, so many of my songs are very image rich from those influences.
Greta Salpeter
#3. Exhausted after a full day of treating patients, William Carlos Williams angrily answered the phone. "Doctor," said a woman's voice, "my child has swallowed a mouse." "Then get him to swallow a cat," he replied, and slammed down the receiver.
Ross Wetzsteon
#4. What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise? - William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
Jodi Picoult
#5. Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places; he is word-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind.
Edward Dahlberg
#6. When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest: There is nothing to eat, seek it where you will, but of the body of the Lord. The blessed plants and the sea, yield it to the imagination intact.
Wendell Berry
#7. III THE DESCENT BECKONS The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned. - William Carlos Williams, The Descent
Cassandra Clare
#8. Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.
Donald Hall
#9. 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
#10. 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
#15. 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
#20. 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
William Carlos Williams
#23. Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.
William Carlos Williams
#24. 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
#26. You're a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?
William Carlos Williams
#27. 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
#28. A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.
William Carlos Williams
#29. It's the anarchy of poverty
delights me, the old
yellow wooden house indented
among the new brick tenements
William Carlos Williams
#31. To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.
William Carlos Williams
#32. 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
#33. 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
#38. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#42. 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
#44. A poem is a small machine made of words ... Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.
William Carlos Williams
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#50. What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.
William Carlos Williams
#52. O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.
William Carlos Williams
#55. My surface is myself.
Under which
to witness, youth is
buried. Roots?
Everybody has roots.
William Carlos Williams
#56. 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
#59. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#62. 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
#63. The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
William Carlos Williams
#64. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#65. Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
William Carlos Williams
#66. 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
#67. The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.
William Carlos Williams
#68. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#69. 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
#70. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.
William Carlos Williams
#76. Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.
William Carlos Williams
#79. [History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
William Carlos Williams
#82. ARRIVAL 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 ... !
William Carlos Williams
#83. 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
#84. 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
#86. 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.
William Carlos Williams
#89. The pure products of America
go crazy ...
... [] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
William Carlos Williams
#90. 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
#91. 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
#96. In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.
William Carlos Williams
#98. 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
#100. 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
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