William Carlos Williams Quotes & Sayings

There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees. — William Carlos Williams

In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which coming between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the screen at the movies. Sometimes there appears to be a maladjustment. The wish would be to see not floating visions of unknown purport but the imaginative qualities of the actual things being perceived accompany their gross vision in a slow dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this will not always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can. — William Carlos Williams

It's a strange courage
you give me ancient star:
Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part! — William Carlos Williams

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

Sunshine of late afternoon
On the glass tray
a glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which
a key is lying
And the
immaculate white bed — William Carlos Williams

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

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

Fools have big wombs. — William Carlos Williams

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

Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell. — William Carlos Williams

The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts. — William Carlos Williams

Through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. — William Carlos Williams

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

You're a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form? — William Carlos Williams

History, history! We fools, what do we know or care. — William Carlos Williams

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

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

In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles. — William Carlos Williams

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? — William Carlos Williams

beauty' is related not to 'loveliness' but to a state in which reality plays a part. — William Carlos Williams

All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts. — William Carlos Williams

This is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold — William Carlos Williams

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

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

So most of my life has been lived in hell. — William Carlos Williams

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

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love. — William Carlos Williams

I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion. — William Carlos Williams

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

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

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. — William Carlos Williams

I prefer not to starve, to live by the practice of medicine, which combines the best features of both science and philosophy with that imponderable and enlightening element, disease, unknown in its normality to either. But, like Pasteur, when he was young, or anyone else who has something to do, I wish I had more money for my literary experiments.
William Carlos Williams, c. 1931 — William Carlos Williams

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. — William Carlos Williams

According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are dissassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transportation into another medium, the imagination. — William Carlos Williams

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

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

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

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

THE THOUGHTFUL LOVER Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it. But it will keep - or it is not worth the having. Never start anything you can't finish - However do not lose faith because you are starved! She loves you she says. Believe it - tomorrow. But today the particulars of poetry that difficult art require your whole attention. — William Carlos Williams

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

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

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

To hell with everything I myself have ever written. — William Carlos Williams

Death will be late to bring us aid — William Carlos Williams

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

Rot dead marigolds- an acre at a time! Gold are you? — William Carlos Williams

Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is. — William Carlos Williams

Empty pockets make empty heads. — William Carlos Williams

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

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

Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated. — William Carlos Williams

Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home. — William Carlos Williams

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze--or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
--as if that answered
anything. Ah, yes--below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore--
Which shore?--
the sand clings to my lips--
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree. — William Carlos Williams

Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again — William Carlos Williams

The perfect man of action, is the suicide. — William Carlos Williams

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

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

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

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

A new world is only a new mind. — William Carlos Williams

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels. — William Carlos Williams

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

First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don't see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place - not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere. — William Carlos Williams

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

Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us. It is our inability to communicate to another how we are locked within ourselves, unable to say the simplest thing of importance to one another, any of us, even the most valuable, that makes our lives like those of a litter of kittens in a wood-pile. — William Carlos Williams

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies. — William Carlos Williams

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

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

All to no end save beauty
the eternal
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful — William Carlos Williams

He was always on the point of 'going away', where it didn't seem to matter ... — William Carlos Williams

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

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

To imitate nature involves the verb to do. To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly: Shakespeare's mirror is all that is needed for it. But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover in ourselves nature's active part. — William Carlos Williams

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. — William Carlos Williams

The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of — William Carlos Williams

The pure products of America
go crazy ...
... [] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car — William Carlos Williams

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned — William Carlos Williams

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

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

That which is possible is inevitable. — William Carlos Williams

But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden — William Carlos Williams

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

The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling. — William Carlos Williams

I have had my dream - like others
And it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
With feet planted on the ground,
And look up at the sky
Feeling my clothes about me,
The weight of my body in my shoes,
The rim of my hat, air passing in and out
At my nose - and decide to dream no more. — William Carlos Williams

It is at the edge of a petal that love waits. — William Carlos Williams

A new music is a new mind. — William Carlos Williams

When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them - without distortion which would mar their exact significances - into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity. — William Carlos Williams

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

Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them — William Carlos Williams

The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets. — William Carlos Williams

Time is a storm in which we are all lost. — William Carlos Williams

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

A house is sometimes wine. It is sometimes more than a skin. — William Carlos Williams

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

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

If they give you lined paper, write the other way. — William Carlos Williams

Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery. — William Carlos Williams

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

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem. — William Carlos Williams

The set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way. — William Carlos Williams