“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
“unsignificantlyoff the coastthere wasa splash quite unnoticedthis was Icarus drowning”
— William Carlos Williams
“We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.”
— William Carlos Williams
“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
“Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell.”
— William Carlos Williams
“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
“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.”
— William Carlos Williams
“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.”
— William Carlos Williams
“The HurricaneThe tree lay downon the garage roof and stretched, You have your heaven, it said, go to it.”
— William Carlos Williams
“Their story, yours, mine – it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.”
— William Carlos Williams
“A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.”
— 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
“But the seawhich no one tendsis also a garden”
— William Carlos Williams
“Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.”
— William Carlos Williams
“What power has love but forgiveness?In other wordsby its interventionwhat has been donecan be undone.What good is it otherwise?”
— William Carlos Williams
“There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. 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.”
— 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
“The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
— William Carlos Williams
“All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.”
— William Carlos Williams
“Time is a storm in which we are all lost.”
— William Carlos Williams
“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
— William Carlos Williams
“For the beginning is assuredlythe end- since we know nothing, pureand simple, beyondour own complexities.”
— William Carlos Williams
“Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,– if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: “I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!” 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?”
— William Carlos Williams
“The business of love is cruelty which,by our wills, we transform to live together.”
— William Carlos Williams
“beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.”
— William Carlos Williams
“so much dependsupona red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the whitechickens.”
— William Carlos Williams
“If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.”
— William Carlos Williams
“Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.”
— William Carlos Williams
“It is at the edge of the petal that love waits”
— William Carlos Williams
“You lethargic, waiting upon me,waiting for the fire and Iattendant upon you, shaken by your beautyShaken by your beauty Shaken.”
— William Carlos Williams