William Carlos Williams Quotes
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It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements
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My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Without invention nothing is well-spaced.
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There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.
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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.
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all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful
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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.
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I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.
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Empty pockets make empty heads.
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The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.
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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.
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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.
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Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.
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It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.
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Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Your knees are a southern breeze.
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Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.
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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.
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The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.
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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.
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What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.
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It is difficult to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
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You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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