William Carlos Williams > Quotes

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

“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

“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, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems

“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

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

“Time is a storm in which we are all lost.”
― William Carlos Williams

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

“Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.”
― William Carlos Williams, The Farmer's Daughters: Collected Short Stories

“It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

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

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

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

“As the rain falls
so does
your love

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

“But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden”
― William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems

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

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

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

“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

“so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

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

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

“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, The Collected Poems, Vol. 2: 1939-1962

“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

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

“I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.”
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“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.”
― William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays

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