William Carlos Williams Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

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

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

History must stay open, it is all humanity.

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.

Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.

and there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away.

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

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

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!

For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.

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

through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones.

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?

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

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.

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.

Nothing whips my blood like verse.

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

But the sea which no one tends is also a garden

Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again

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?

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow

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.

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

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.

I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.

Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse-- at least, blinded by the light, young love is.

A new world is only a new mind.

A new music is a new mind.

Death will be too late to bring us aid.

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.

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

we, in that instant, lost, breathless to be witnesses, as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire.

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

A poem is a small machine made of words.

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.

There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

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.

To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means Sniffing the trees, just another dog among a lot of dogs.What else is there? And to do?

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.

all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful

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

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.

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