William Carlos Williams Quotes

91 quotes in 1209 categories

• Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!
• A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.
• Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around…
• No ideas but in things.
• The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.
• One thing I am convinced more and more is true, and that is this: The only way to be truly happy is to make others…
• The Moon, the dried weeds and the Pleiades - Seven feet tall the dark, dried weed stalks make a part of the night a red…
• Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly - to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut…
• To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.
• 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…
• History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.
• Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.
• 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…
• My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. … it filled me with soul…
• The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of

Browse William Carlos Williams Quotes by Category