William Carlos Williams Quotes

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.

I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my poetry.

Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

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

That which is possible is inevitable.

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

Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

He's come out of the man and he's let the man go —

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.

It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.

Not now. Love itself a flower with roots in a parched ground. Empty pockets make empty heads. Cure it if you can but do not believe that we can live today in the country for the country will bring us no peace.

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

…those who belong properly to books, and to whom books, perhaps, do not quite so properly belong.