William Carlos Williams famous quotes

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

#Love #Sky #Weight

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

#Suicidal #Blue #Joy

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

#Men #Poetry #News

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

#Roots #Youth #Conformity

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned
-- William Carlos Williams

#Ascent #Descent

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

#Stress #Writing #Men

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

#Writing #Thinking #Disease

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

#Eye #Long #Heaven

The pure products of America go crazy
-- William Carlos Williams

#Crazy #America

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

#Summer #Song #Nature

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

#Love #Flower #Waiting

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

#Believe #Facts #Belief

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

#Reality #Wings #Air

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

#Machines #Made

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

#Art #Past #Vision

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

#Optimistic #Perfect #Way

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

#Lying #Secret #Age

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!
-- William Carlos Williams

#Truth #Bird #Fool

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

#Order #Imagination #Delight

Nothing whips my blood like verse.
-- William Carlos Williams

#Blood #Verses

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

#Discovery #Dissonance

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

#Storm #Lost

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

#Imagination #Mind #Use

It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.
-- William Carlos Williams

#Sweaters #Brown

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

#Snow #Bird #Tree

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.
-- William Carlos Williams

#Crazy #Kentucky #America

History must stay open, it is all humanity.
-- William Carlos Williams

#History #Humanity

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

#Fire #Shining #Vision

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

#Pleasure

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

#Broken Heart #Love Is #Together

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

#America #Giving #Literature

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

#Sunshine #Wings #Envy

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

#Philosophy #Writing #Men

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

#Next #Chaos #Multiplicity

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

#Ideas #Light #House

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

#Use #Demand #Facts

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

#Sex #Hens #Roosters

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

#Language #Idiom #Heard

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

#History #Fool #Care

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

#Lying #Sunshine #Keys

Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.
-- William Carlos Williams

#Divorce

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

#Flower #Thinking #Thoughtful

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

#Sentimental #Machines #Made

Who isn't frustrated and does not prove it by his actions - if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.
-- William Carlos Williams

#Art #Men #Frustrated

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

#Men #Life Is #Defeated

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

#Moving #Rain #Dark

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

#Beauty #Beautiful #Humanity

By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast - a cold wind.
-- William Carlos Williams

#Blue #Wind #Clouds

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow
-- William Carlos Williams

#Red #Wheels

So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field.
-- William Carlos Williams

#Men #Fields #Different

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

#Art #Principles #Form

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

#Yellow #House #Delight

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

#Way #Fool #Conducting

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

#Anticipation #Endless #Descent

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

#Mind #Goes On #Lines

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

#Character #Feelings #Speech

Without invention nothing is well-spaced.
-- William Carlos Williams

#Invention #Wells

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

#Perfect #Machines #May