William Carlos Williams Quotes

We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

Meanwhile, the old man who goes about gathering dog-lime walks in the gutter without looking up and his tread is more majestic than that of the Episcopal minister approaching the pulpit of a Sunday. These things astonish me beyond words.

If you are not already too blind
too deaf, too lost in the past
to know or to care — I will write a book about you — making you live (in a book!)
as you still desperately
want to live — to live always — unforgiving

"Portrait of the Author"

The birches are mad with green points
the wood's edge is burning with their green,
burning, seething — No, no, no.
The birches are opening their leaves one
by one. Their delicate leaves unfold cold
and separate, one by one. Slender tassels
hang swaying from the delicate branch tips — Oh, I cannot say it. There is no word.
Black is split at once into flowers. In
every bog and ditch, flares of
small fire, white flowers! — Agh,
the birches are mad, mad with their green.
The world is gone, torn into shreds
with this blessing. What have I left undone
that I should have undertaken?
O my brother, you redfaced, living man
ignorant, stupid whose feet are upon
this same dirt that I touch — and eat.
We are alone in this terror, alone,
face to face on this road, you and I,
wrapped by this flame!
Let the polished plows stay idle,
their gloss already on the black soil.
But that face of yours — !
Answer me. I will clutch you. I
will hug you, grip you. I will poke my face
into your face and force you to see me.
Take me in your arms, tell me the commonest
thing that is in your mind to say,
say anything. I will understand you — !
It is the madness of the birch leaves opening
cold, one by one.

My rooms will receive me. But my rooms
are no longer sweet spaces where comfort
is ready to wait on me with its crumbs.
A darkness has brushed them. The mass
of yellow tulips in the bowl is shrunken.
Every familiar object is changed and dwarfed.
I am shaken, broken against a might
that splits comfort, blows apart
my careful partitions, crushes my house
and leaves me — with shrinking heart
and startled, empty eyes — peering out
into a cold world.

In the spring I would be drunk! In the spring
I would be drunk and lie forgetting all things.
Your face! Give me your face, Yang Kue Fei!
your hands, your lips to drink!
Give me your wrists to drink — I drag you, I am drowned in you, you
overwhelm me! Drink!
Save me! The shad bush is in the edge
of the clearing. The yards in a

The pure products of America go crazy —

A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.

A man isn’t a block that remains stationary though the psychologists treat him so — and most take an insane pride in believing it. Consistency! He varies; Hamlet today, Caesar tomorrow; here, there, somewhere — if he is to retain his sanity, and why not? The arts have a complex relation to society. The poet isn’t a fixed phenomenon, no more is his work.

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat — since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected. A world lost, a world unsuspected beckons to new places and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness .

Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.

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.

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized
of new kinds — since their movements
are toward new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned)

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat — since
the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected. A
world lost
a world unsuspected
beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness

With evening, love wakens
though its shadows
which are alive by reason
of the sun shining — grow sleepy now and drop away
from desire

Love without shadows stirs now
beginning to awaken
as night
advances

The descent
made up of despairs
and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening:
which is a reversal
of despair
For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love
what we have lost in the anticipation — a descent follows
endless and indestructible

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

If they give you lined paper, write the other way.

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze — or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard? — as if that answered
anything. Ah, yes — below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore — Which shore? — the sand clings to my lips — Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.