William Carlos Williams Quotes

Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself - sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity.

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.

Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.

It is difficult to get the news from poems

ARRIVAL 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...!

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

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

I think these days when there is so little to believe in — — when the old loyalties — — God, country, and the hope of Heaven — — aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in — — someone who seems beautiful.

A new music is a new mind.

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

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

Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it - It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but -

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

If anything of the moment results — so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it.

The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.

According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are dissassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transportation into another medium, the imagination.