William Carlos Williams > Quotes

“This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold”
― William Carlos Williams

“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

“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

“If they give you lined paper, write the other way.”
― William Carlos Williams

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

Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.”
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.”
― William Carlos Williams

“As the rain falls
so does
your love

bathe every
open
object of the world”
― William Carlos Williams

“Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell.”
― William Carlos Williams

“In summer, the song sings itself.”
― William Carlos Williams

“Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.”
― William Carlos Williams, The Farmers' Daughters

“If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.”
― William Carlos Williams

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

“Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.”
― William Carlos Williams

“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.”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol. 2: 1939-1962

“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, Spring and All

“Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.”
― William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell

“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

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

“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.”
― William Carlos Williams

“That which is possible is inevitable.”
― William Carlos Williams

“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.”
― William Carlos Williams

“All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.”
― William Carlos Williams

“beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.”
― William Carlos Williams

“The only realism in art is of the imagination.”
― William Carlos Williams

“The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
― William Carlos Williams, Howl and Other Poems

“Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.”
― William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell

“Rot dead marigolds- an acre at a time! Gold are you?”
― William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell

“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, Kora in Hell

“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, Kora in Hell

“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, Kora in Hell

“A new music is a new mind.”
― 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, Spring and All

“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

“Death will be late to bring us aid”
― 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, Kora in Hell

“You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.”
― William Carlos Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet

“The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned”
― William Carlos Williams

“For the beginning is assuredly
the end- since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.”
― William Carlos Williams

“The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol. 1: 1909-1939

“The Last Words of My English Grandmother

There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed--

Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,

Gimme something to eat--
They're starving me--
I'm all right--I won't go
to the hospital. No, no, no

Give me something to eat!
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well

you can do as you please.
She smiled, Yes
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please--

Oh, oh, oh! she cried
as the ambulance men lifted
her to the stretcher--
Is this what you call

making me comfortable?
By now her mind was clear--
Oh you think you're smart
you young people,

she said, but I'll tell you
you don't know anything.
Then we started.
On the way

we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,

What are all those
fuzzy looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I'm tired
of them and rolled her head away.”
― William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems

“A house is sometimes wine. It is sometimes more than a skin.”
― William Carlos Williams

“Your thighs are apple trees. Your knees are the southern breeze.”
― William Carlos Williams

“In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.”
― William Carlos Williams

“You're a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?”
― William Carlos Williams, Many Loves and Other Plays: The Collected Plays of William Carlos Williams

“Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one 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”
― William Carlos Williams

“-age's lust loose!”
― William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell

“According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are dissassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transportation into another medium, the imagination.”
― William Carlos Williams

“The pure products of America
go crazy...

...[] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car”
― William Carlos Williams