William Carlos Williams quotes

In summer, the song sings itself. (William Carlos Williams)
That which is possible is inevitable.
William Carlos Williams
I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my poetry.
William Carlos Williams
the set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way.
William Carlos Williams
If they give you lined paper, write the other way.
William Carlos Williams
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
William Carlos Williams
Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.
William Carlos Williams
Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.
William Carlos Williams
I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.
William Carlos Williams
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
William Carlos Williams
Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again. (William Carlos Williams)
Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact ... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.
William Carlos Williams
Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.
William Carlos Williams
There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
William Carlos Williams
By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast - a cold wind.
William Carlos Williams
The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
William Carlos Williams
Who isn't frustrated and does not prove it by his actions - if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.
William Carlos Williams
Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind - But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested - the snow is covered with broken seed husks and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty.
William Carlos Williams
One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: the only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.
William Carlos Williams
The pure products of America go crazy.
William Carlos Williams
Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle. (William Carlos Williams)
Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
William Carlos Williams
It's a strange courage you give me ancient star:Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!
William Carlos Williams
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.
William Carlos Williams
My first poem was a bolt from the blue ... it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy.
William Carlos Williams