William Carlos Williams Quotes

124 Sourced Quotes

Why do we live? Most of us need the very thing we never ask for. We talk about revolution as if it was peanuts. What we need is some frank thinking and a few revolutions in our own guts; to hell with what most of the sons of bitches that I know and myself along with them if I don't take hold of myself and turn about when I need to — or go ahead further if that's the game.

William Carlos Williams
Lift your flowers
on bitter stems
chickory!
Lift them up
out of the scorched ground!
Bear no foliage
but give yourself
wholly to that!
Strain under them
you bitter stems
that no beast eats —
and scorn greyness!

William Carlos Williams
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.

William Carlos Williams
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.

William Carlos Williams
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.

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

William Carlos Williams
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.

William Carlos Williams
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
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
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.

William Carlos Williams
A poem is a small machine made of words...Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

William Carlos Williams
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
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?

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

William Carlos Williams
Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind - But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested - the snow is covered with broken seed husks and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty.

William Carlos Williams
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
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.

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

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

William Carlos Williams
My "medicine" was the thing that gained me entrance to these secret gardens of the self. It lay there, another world, in the self. I was permitted by my medical badge to follow the poor, defeated body into these gulfs and grottos.

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

William Carlos Williams
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.

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

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

William Carlos Williams
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
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

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

William Carlos Williams