William Carlos Williams Quotes - Page 2

That which is possible is inevitable.

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 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.

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

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

Nothing whips my blood like verse.

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.

No ideas but in things.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Empty pockets make empty heads.

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

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

But the sea which no one tends is also a garden

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned

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.

Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse-- at least, blinded by the light, young love is.

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

The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.