William Carlos Williams
When I am alone I am happy.Collection: Single
There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.Collection: Son
It was the love of love, the love of swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of natural, of people, of animals, a love ingengering gentleness and goodness that moved meand that I saw in youCollection: Love
Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. - through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.Collection: Weed
When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them - without distortion which would mar their exact significances - into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.Collection: Art
Empty pockets make empty heads.Collection: Pockets
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.Collection: Perfect
A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.Collection: Character
For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Writing
THE THOUGHTFUL LOVER Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it. But it will keep—or it is not worth the having. Never start anything you can't finish— However do not lose faith because you are starved! She loves you she says. Believe it —tomorrow. But today the particulars of poetry that difficult art require your whole attention.Collection: Art
Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.Collection: Home
But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Writing
Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.Collection: Art
The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.Collection: Broken Heart
Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.Collection: Moving
I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky wayCollection: Sweet
Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year.Collection: Grieving
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.Collection: Sunshine
The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard ofCollection: Language
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.Collection: Wall
Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see themCollection: Strange
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Autumn
A poem is a small machine made of words.Collection: Machines
There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.Collection: Sentimental
Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.Collection: Moving
The pure products of America go crazy--mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.Collection: Crazy
The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless-unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew.Collection: Imagination
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?Collection: Grief
To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means Sniffing the trees, just another dog among a lot of dogs.What else is there? And to do?Collection: Dog
Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.Collection: America
Say it, no ideas but in things - nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident - split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained - secret - into the body of the light!Collection: Light
One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken.Collection: Profound
I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.Collection: Eye
through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones.Collection: People
I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage!Collection: Truth
Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.Collection: Home
The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.Collection: Suicide
Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.Collection: Shoes
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Criticism
History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.Collection: History