William Carlos Williams Quotes

It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.

Empty pockets make empty heads.

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

Their story, yours and mine -- it

Practical to the end, it is the poem of his existence that triumphed finally;...

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?

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.

Rot dead marigolds- an acre at a time! Gold are you?

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

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.

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.

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.

Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.

A poem is a small machine made of words.

Their time past, pulled down cracked and flung to the fire go up in a roar All recognition lost, burnt clean clean in the flame, the green dispersed, a living red, flame red, red as blood wakes on the ash--

In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.

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.

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.

-age's lust loose!

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.

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.

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

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