William Carlos Williams Quotes

A house is sometimes wine. It is sometimes more than a skin.

Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers— old and experienced— returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.

Clean is he alone
after whom stream
the broken pieces of the city — flying apart at his approaches

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.

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

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

Their story, yours, mine - it's what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.

Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned

Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.

There's a lot of bastards out there!

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.