William Carlos Williams Quotes (20 Quotes)

So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated -- thrown aside -- a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination.

Houses the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight.

O frost bitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches. Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine. The twigs conspire against you Hear hem They hold you from behind.

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

By listening to the language of his locality the poet learns his craft. It is his function to lift, by the use of his imagination . . . his environment to the sphere . . . where they will have a new currency.

Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.

Its the anarchy of poverty delights me.

O Marvelous what new configuration will come next I am bewildered with multiplicity.

No wreaths please especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by his old clothes a few books perhaps.

Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails they glide to the wind tossing green water from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls.

It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.

The Moon, the dried weeds and the Pleiades Seven feet tall the dark, dried weedstalks make a part of the night a red lace on the milky blue sky.

When they ask me . . . how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem. I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.

Hell take curtains Go with some show of inconvenience sit openly to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut your grief in.

THESE are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night.

No woman is virtuous who does not give herself to her lover for with.