William Carlos Williams Quotes

Love without shadows stirs now beginning to waken 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 . Listen! — the pouring water! The dogs and trees conspire to invent a world — gone!

At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse — at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.

He was always on the point of 'going away', where it didn't seem to matter...

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.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

Pop told me many times after that that he had sent a wire forthwith to Jesse Paine, an old friend and neighbor of ours from Passaic Avenue, then residing in Los Angeles, asking what, if anything, had happened to Lou, his wife. Two weeks later he received a letter saying that Jesse was sorry not to have been able to answer the telegram sooner, the reason being that Lou had been ill; in fact at the time the telegram had arrived, she was in the hospital where, that day, she had been given up for dead, following a serious abdominal operation

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. 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 province of the poem is the world.
When the sun rises, it rises in the poem
and when it sets darkness comes down
and the poem is dark .

and lamps are lit, cats prowl and men
read, read–or mumble and stare
at that which their small lights distinguish
or obscure or their hands search out

in the dark. The poem moves them or
it does not move them. Faitoute, his ears
ringing . no sound . no great city,
as he seems to read–

perhaps it is all art
and Barnum our one genius (in the arts)
on the moral plane

We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech

After some years of varied experience with the bodies of the rich and the poor a man finds little to distinguish between them, bulks them as one and bases his working judgements on other matters.

Unleashed! Alone, watching the May moon above the trees . At nine o’clock the park closes. You must be out of the lake, dressed, in your cars and going: they change into their street clothes in the back seats and move out among the trees . The “great beast” all removed before the plunging night, the crickets’ black wings and hylas wake .

The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do? And what do I care?

There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine, to give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which it is native. Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous. It may be that my interests as expressed here are pre-art. If so I look for a development along these lines and will be satisfied with nothing else.

That which is possible is inevitable.