William Carlos Williams Quotes:

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

source: - William Carlos Williams (1994). “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems”, p.4, New Directions Publishing

Topics: 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

source: - "The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams" by William Carlos Williams, W. W. Norton & Co., 1951.

Topics: Suicidal, Blue, Joy, Disillusion

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

source: - "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" bk. 1, l. 317 (1955)

Topics: Men, Poetry, News

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

Topics: Roots, Youth, Conformity

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned

Topics: Ascent, Descent

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

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.188, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Stress, Writing, Men, Great Person, Under Stress

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

Topics: 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.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1995). “Paterson”, p.23, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Eye, Long, Heaven

The pure products of America go crazy

Topics: Crazy, America

In summer, the song sings itself.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.349, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Summer, Song, Nature, Summer Flower, Summer Inspirational

It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1971). “Imaginations”, p.150, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Reality, Wings, Air, Birds Wings

A poem is a small machine made out of words.

Topics: Machines, Made, Literary Characters

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.

Topics: 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.

source: - William Carlos Williams, John C. Thirlwall (1957). “The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams”, p.5, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Optimistic, Perfect, Way, Make Others Happy, Truly Happy

It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.

Topics: 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!

Topics: 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.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1971). “Imaginations”, p.35, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Order, Imagination, Delight

Nothing whips my blood like verse.

Topics: Blood, Verses

Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1995). “Paterson”, p.175, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Discovery, Dissonance

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

Topics: Storm, Lost

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

Topics: Imagination, Mind, Use

It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.

source: - William Carlos Williams, Macha Louis Rosenthal (1966). “The William Carlos Williams Reader”, p.105, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Sweaters, Brown

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

Topics: Snow, Bird, Tree, Skimming, Bare Trees

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.

Topics: Crazy, Kentucky, America

History must stay open, it is all humanity.

Topics: History, Humanity

we, in that instant, lost, breathless to be witnesses, as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire.

Topics: Fire, Shining, Vision, Breathless

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

Topics: Pleasure

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Sunshine, Wings, Envy, Twigs

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.

Topics: Philosophy, Writing, Men

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

Topics: Next, Chaos, Multiplicity, Configuration, Bewildered

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!

Topics: Ideas, Light, House, Preconceptions

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

Topics: 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?

Topics: Sex, Hens, Roosters

The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of

Topics: Language, Idiom, Heard

History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.

Topics: 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

Topics: Lying, Sunshine, Keys, Late Afternoon, Trays

Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.

Topics: Divorce

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

source: - William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.455, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Flower, Thinking, Thoughtful

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Art, Men, Frustrated

Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Moving, Rain, Dark, Dark City, Gongs

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Blue, Wind, Clouds, Cold Wind

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow

Topics: Red, Wheels

So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field.

Topics: Men, Fields, Different

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

Topics: Art, Principles, Form

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

Topics: Yellow, House, Delight, Wooden House, Tenements

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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Anticipation, Endless, Descent, Denied

Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness

source: - 1948 Paterson, bk.2,'Sunday in the Park',1.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Character, Feelings, Speech

Without invention nothing is well-spaced.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Perfect, Machines, May

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.

Topics: Thinking, Whales, Numbers, Lao Tzu, Dwarfs

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

source: - "Modern American Poetry". Book by Louis Untermeyer, 1950.

Topics: Jobs, Use, Language

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.

source: - Ian D. Copestake, William Carlos Williams (2004). “Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams”, p.179, Peter Lang

Topics: Smell, Taught, World

A new world is only a new mind.

source: - William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.247, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Responsibility, Mind, World

A new music is a new mind.

Topics: Mind, Music Is, New Music

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1954). “Selected Essays”, New York, Random House

Topics: Beautiful, Loyalty, Country

What power has love but forgiveness?

source: - Oriole Farb Feshbach, William Carlos Williams (1991). “Illuminations: images by Oriole Farb Feshbach for the poem "Asphodel, that greeny flower" by William Carlos Williams”, Midmarch Arts Pr

Topics: Forgiveness, Power Of Forgiveness

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.

Topics: Spring, Medicine, Years, Spoken Word

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.

Topics: Art, Poetry, Sensual

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.

Topics: Writing, Reality, Imagination, Purpose Of Writing, Daily Experience

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1971). “Imaginations”, p.15, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Art, Imagination, Realism

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1994). “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems”, p.46, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Love, Love Is

That which is possible is inevitable.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1984). “The Doctor Stories”, p.88, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Inevitable

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams, Robert McAlmon (1967). “Contact”

Topics: Comment, Ifs

No ideas but in things.

source: - Paterson bk. 1, sec. 1 (1946)

Topics: Ideas, Crafts, No Idea

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

source: - William Carlos Williams, John C. Thirlwall (1957). “The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams”, p.81, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Love, Response, Knows

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

source: - William Carlos Williams (1994). “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems”, p.16, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Heart, Helen, Knows

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Topics: Beauty, Beautiful, Eye, Physical Beauty, Makeup And Beauty

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

Topics: Eye, Angel, Blind

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

source: - "The Red Wheelbarrow" l. 1 (1923)

Topics: Rain, White, Water, Rain Water, Wheelbarrows

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.

source: - "The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams".

Topics: Love, Romantic, Flower, Petals

The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.

source: - William Carlos Williams, Macha Louis Rosenthal (1966). “The William Carlos Williams Reader”, p.21, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Secret, Wraps

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.

Topics: Imagination, Listening, Use, Locality

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

source: - William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.68, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Rain, Flower, Compassion, Spring Flowers, Pink Flower

But the sea which no one tends is also a garden

source: - William Carlos Williams (1967). “Pictures from Brueghel, and Other Poems: Collected Poems, 1950-1962”, p.156, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Garden, Sea

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

source: - William Carlos Williams (1978). “A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists”, New Directions Publishing Corporation

Topics: History, Imagination, Soul

Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse-- at least, blinded by the light, young love is.

source: - William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.289, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Selfish, Love Is, Light, Sure Love

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

source: - 1954 Letter to Richard Eberhart, 23 May.

Topics: Writing, My Own

Empty pockets make empty heads.

source: - William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.88, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Pockets, Poverty, Empty, Empty Heads, Empty Pockets

When I am alone I am happy.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.163, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Single, Being Single

The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.

source: - William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher John MacGowan (1986). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1909-1939”, p.312, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Writing, Vision, Facts, Human Values

A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.

Topics: Song, Bed, Sound

As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.527, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Rain, Fall, Doe

Death will be too late to bring us aid.

source: - "Paterson".

Topics: Aids, Late

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

source: - William Carlos Williams (1956). “In the American Grain”, p.190, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Errors, History, May, Printer

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.178, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Imagination, Moments, Eternity

Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realise his wishes- Now that he can realise them, he must either change them or perish

Topics: Men, Ignorant, Wish

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.204, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Reality, Play, States

Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.379, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Sweet, White, Broken

and there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away.

source: - 1949 Paterson, bk.3,'The Library'.

Topics: Moving, Wind, Mind

Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.160, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Love Is, Green, Woods

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?

source: - "Danse Russe" l. 18 (1917)

Topics: Baby, Lonely, Sleep, Buttocks, I Am Lonely

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams, “Kora In Hell: Improvisations XXVII”

Topics: Son, Clouds, Wind, Aprons, Nightfall

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

Topics: Love, Grateful, Funny Relationship, Grateful Love

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. - through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of Williams Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.455, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Weed, Flower, Writing

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.54, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Art, Men, Expression

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

source: - 1946 Paterson, bk.1, preface.

Topics: Simple, Ends, Complexity

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1971). “Imaginations”, p.13, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Writing, Spirit, Damn

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.

Topics: Art, Believe, Love You

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.70, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Home, Writing, Faces, Womens Day, Returning Home

But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1920). “Kora in Hell: Improvisations”

Topics: Art, Lying, Writing, Finality

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams, Ron Loewinsohn (1974). “The Embodiment of Knowledge”, p.104, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Writing, Men, Defeated

The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.

source: - "Imaginations".

Topics: Suicide, Men, Perfect

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1938). “The complete collected poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906-1938”, Norfolk, Conn.

Topics: Flower, Book, Clothes, Memento, Old Clothes

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

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of Williams Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.256, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Sweet, Flower, Thinking, Flowing River

Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.171, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Grieving, Fire, Flames

And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom-- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind.

source: - William Carlos Williams, Charles Tomlinson (1985). “Selected Poems”, p.32, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Autumn, Winter, Wind

Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them

source: - William Carlos Williams, Macha Louis Rosenthal (1966). “The William Carlos Williams Reader”, p.7, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Strange, Hours, Dues

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1971). “Imaginations”, p.31, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Wall, Liars, Mushrooms, Fungi, Blackberries

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.

source: - 1921 Sour Grapes, 'Overture to a Dance of Locomotives'.

Topics: Moving, Hands, Forever

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.310, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Imagination, Rose, Scent

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?

source: - William Carlos Williams, Macha Louis Rosenthal (1966). “The William Carlos Williams Reader”, p.5, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Grief, Thinking, Weather

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?

source: - 1946 Paterson, bk.1, preface.

Topics: Dog, Mean, Tree, Rolling Up, Sniffing

One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken.

source: - 1923 Spring and All, 'Spring and All'.

Topics: Profound, Down And, Dignity

I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1997). “Early Poems”, p.50, Courier Corporation

Topics: Eye, Compassion, Hair

Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.

source: - William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.66, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Home, Giving, Despair, Cloudy

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.

source: - 'Tract'

Topics: Artist, Funeral, World

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams, Macha Louis Rosenthal (1966). “The William Carlos Williams Reader”, p.105, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Criticism, Emotion, Virtue, Stirrers

Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Your knees are a southern breeze.

source: - "The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams".

Topics: Southern, Lust, Knees, Thighs

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.

source: - William Carlos Williams, Macha Louis Rosenthal (1966). “The William Carlos Williams Reader”, p.362, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Loss, Dull, Happens

Love is that common tone shall raise his fiery head and sound his note.

source: - 1954 The Desert Music, 'The Orchestra'.

Topics: Love Is, Sound, Tone

At our age the imagination across the sorry facts lifts us to make roses stand before thorns. Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse— at least, blinded by the light, young love is. But we are older, I to love and you to be loved, we have, no matter how, by our wills survived to keep the jeweled prize always at our finger tips. We will it so and so it is past all accident.

source: - William Carlos Williams, Charles Tomlinson (1985). “Selected Poems”, p.215, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Love, Sorry, Selfish, Sure Love

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

source: - William Carlos Williams, Edith Heal (1978). “I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet”, p.23, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Stars, Giving, Shining

The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.

source: - William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.53, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Art, War, Writing, Diversion

Minds like beds always made up (more stony than a shore) unwilling or unable.

source: - 'Paterson' (1946) bk. 1, preface

Topics: Mind, Bed, Made, Unwilling

the set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.70, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Citizens, Pieces, Way

For there is a wind or a ghost of wind in all books echoing the life there, a high wind that fills the tubes of the ear until we think we hear a wind, actual.

source: - 1949 Paterson, bk.3,'The Library'.

Topics: Book, Thinking, Wind, Tubes

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.

Topics: Blind, Blindness

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

Topics: Weed, Dark, Moon

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.

source: - 1923 Spring and All, 'Spring and All'.

Topics: Spring, Naked, World, Lifeless, Dazed

Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr.

source: - William Carlos Williams, Macha Louis Rosenthal (1966). “The William Carlos Williams Reader”, p.109, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Cat, Wind, Dying, North Wind

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1971). “Imaginations”, p.31, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Shoes, Lilies, Incredibles

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.

source: - Ian D. Copestake, William Carlos Williams (2004). “Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams”, p.100, Peter Lang

Topics: Heart, Dark, Night, Stupidity Of Man, Desolate

Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.58, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Sunset, Dark, Night

You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1995). “Paterson”, p.126, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Fire, Waiting, Lethargic

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

source: - William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.204, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Loveliness