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William Carlos Williams Quotes

American poet, Birth: 17-9-1883, Death: 4-3-1963 William Carlos Williams Quotes
1.
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

2.
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

3.
The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
William Carlos Williams

4.
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

5.
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

Similar Authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson William Shakespeare C. S. Lewis Rumi Samuel Johnson George Herbert George Eliot Maya Angelou Horace Charles Bukowski John Milton Alexander Pope Ovid Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Sylvia Plath
6.
The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
William Carlos Williams

7.
The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.
William Carlos Williams

8.
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

Quote Topics by William Carlos Williams: Writing Men Art Imagination Wind Flower Thinking Love Mind Love Is Machines Dark Made Rain Eye History Use Vision World Perfect Beautiful Giving Moving Reality Lying Ifs Fire Fool Tree Heart
9.
It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.
William Carlos Williams

10.
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.
William Carlos Williams

11.
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

12.
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.
William Carlos Williams

13.
In summer, the song sings itself.
William Carlos Williams

14.
I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.
William Carlos Williams

15.
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

16.
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

17.
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.
William Carlos Williams

18.
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
William Carlos Williams

19.
The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned
William Carlos Williams

20.
A poem is a small machine made out of words.
William Carlos Williams

21.
[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
William Carlos Williams

22.
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

23.
Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.
William Carlos Williams

24.
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

25.
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

26.
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

27.
Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.
William Carlos Williams

28.
No ideas but in things.
William Carlos Williams

29.
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.
William Carlos Williams

30.
Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Your knees are a southern breeze.
William Carlos Williams

31.
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

32.
The pure products of America go crazy
William Carlos Williams

33.
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

34.
A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.
William Carlos Williams

35.
Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.
William Carlos Williams

36.
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

37.
What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.
William Carlos Williams

38.
What power has love but forgiveness?
William Carlos Williams

39.
It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements
William Carlos Williams

40.
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
William Carlos Williams

41.
The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.
William Carlos Williams

42.
My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.
William Carlos Williams

43.
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

44.
All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.
William Carlos Williams

45.
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
William Carlos Williams

46.
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

47.
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.
William Carlos Williams

48.
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

49.
No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.
William Carlos Williams

50.
Empty pockets make empty heads.
William Carlos Williams