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.

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.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

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.

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.

In summer, the song sings itself.

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

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.

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.

The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

No ideas but in things.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

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.

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.

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.

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

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

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.

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.

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

I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way

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.

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.

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.

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

Empty pockets make empty heads.