William Carlos Williams Quotes

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

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

In summer, the song sings itself.

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.

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

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned

A poem is a small machine made out of words.

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

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

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.

Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

No ideas but in things.

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

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.

The pure products of America go crazy

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

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

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

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

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

What power has love but forgiveness?

It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements

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

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

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

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.

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

Empty pockets make empty heads.

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

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

Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness

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

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.

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

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

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

It is difficult to get the news from poetry, 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.

When I am alone I am happy.