William Carlos Williams Quotes

And this moral? As with the deformed Aesop, morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds.

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Yet there is
no return: rolling up out of chaos,
a nine months’ wonder, the city
the man, an identity — it can’t be
otherwise — an
interpenetration, both ways. Rolling
up! Obverse, reverse;
the drunk the sober; the illustrious
the gross; one. In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing.

they are mystified by certain instances.

the faucet of
June that rings
the triangle of the air

I asked him, What do you do?

He smiled patiently, The typical American question.
In Europe they would ask, What are you doing? Or,
What are you doing now?

What do I do? I listen, to the water falling. (No
sound of it here but with the wind!) This is my entire
occupation.

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.

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!

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.

Black wind, I have poured my heart out
to you until I am sick of it-

Now I run my hand over you feeling
the play of your body - the quiver
of it's strength-

Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr.
Paterson has gone away
to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees
his thoughts sitting and standing. His
thoughts alight and scatter–

Who are these people (how complex
the mathematic) among whom I see myself
in the regularly ordered plateglass of
his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?

<p>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.</p>

<p> from “Journey to Love</p>

The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill.

In my life the furniture eats me

the chairs, the floor
the walls
which heard your sobs
drank up my emotion-
they which alone know everything

and snitched on us in the morning-

In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which coming between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the screen at the movies. Sometimes there appears to be a maladjustment. The wish would be to see not floating visions of unknown purport but the imaginative qualities of the actual things being perceived accompany their gross vision in a slow dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this will not always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can.