Quotes from William Carlos Williams

The crowd at the ball gameis moved uniformlyby a spirit of uselessnesswhich delights them—

as if the earth under our feetwerean excrement of some skyand we degraded prisonersdestinedto hunger until we eat filth

A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

By the road to the contagious hospitalunder the surge of the bluemottled clouds driven from thenortheast—a cold wind.

What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.

All men by their nature give praise.It is allthey can do.

Who shall say I am notthe happy genius of my household?

Then back to the party!and they maledand femaled you jealouslyBeautiful Thingas if to discover whence andby what miraclethere should escape, what?

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.

The perfect man of action, is the suicide.

It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!

We sit and talk, quietly, with long lapses of silence and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes which has no speech

This is Just to Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

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

If they give you lined paper, write the other way.

You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.

Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell.

Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.

It is at the edge of the petal that love waits

In summer, the song sings itself.

As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world

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

But the sea which no one tends is also a garden

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.