Quotes from William Carlos Williams

It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

A new music is a new mind.

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?

The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech-- is, of necessity, my sole concern.

It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.

For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

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.

He was always on the point of 'going away', where it didn't seem to matter...

Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

It was ... a love engendering gentleness and goodness that moved me and that I saw in you

Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr.

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.

It's just a moment, we die every night.

It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence. Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.

Say it! No ideas but in things.

So most of my life has been lived in hell.

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. 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.

Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge

The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.

Death will be late to bring us aid