William Carlos Williams Quotes

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

A new music is a new mind.

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

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

The past above, the future below
and the present pouring down: the roar,
the roar of the present, a speech — is, of necessity, my sole concern.

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

For the beginning is assuredly
the end- since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.

"Danse Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees, — if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades, — Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?"

Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.

But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

It was ...
a love engendering
gentleness and goodness
that moved me
and that I saw in you

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

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.