Top 150 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

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

A new world is only a new mind.

What power has love but forgiveness?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

A poem is a small machine made out of words.

No ideas but in things.

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

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

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.

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned

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

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.

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.

You have the chicken, the hen, and the rooster. The chicken goes with the hen So who is having sex with the rooster?

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

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

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.

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

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.

That which is possible is inevitable.

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.

Nothing whips my blood like verse.

In summer, the song sings itself.

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

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

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

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.

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.

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

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.

The pure products of America go crazy

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.

A new music is a new mind.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.

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.

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.

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.