William Carlos Williams Quotes - Page 5

we, in that instant, lost, breathless to be witnesses, as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire.

Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them

And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom-- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind.

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.

A poem is a small machine made of words.

There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.

The pure products of America go crazy--mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.

The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless-unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew.

Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly - to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut your grief in?

To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means Sniffing the trees, just another dog among a lot of dogs.What else is there? And to do?

Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful

Say it, no ideas but in things - nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident - split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained - secret - into the body of the light!

One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken.

I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.

through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones.

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.

I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage!

Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.

It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements

O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.

Sunshine of late afternoon-- On the glass tray a glass pitcher, the tumbler turned down, by which a key is lying--And the immaculate white bed

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?

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow