William Carlos Williams Quotes - Page 4

Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

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

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

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.

Who isn't frustrated and does not prove it by his actions - if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.

It was the love of love, the love of swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of natural, of people, of animals, a love ingengering gentleness and goodness that moved meand that I saw in you

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. - through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them - without distortion which would mar their exact significances - into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

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.

A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

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.

Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.

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.

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.

The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.

The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.

No wreaths please - especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes - a few books perhaps.

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.

I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way

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.

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.

The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of