William Carlos Williams Quotes - Page 3

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind - But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested - the snow is covered with broken seed husks and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty.

I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.

The pure products of America go crazy

All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.

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

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.

As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world

Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

Death will be too late to bring us aid.

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.

No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.

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

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

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.

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.

Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again

History must stay open, it is all humanity.

You have the chicken, the hen, and the rooster. The chicken goes with the hen So who is having sex with the rooster?

When I am alone I am happy.

So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field.

and there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away.

Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realise his wishes- Now that he can realise them, he must either change them or perish

Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge