Quotes from William Carlos Williams

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

I prefer not to starve, to live by the practice of medicine, which combines the best features of both science and philosophy with that imponderable and enlightening element, disease, unknown in its normality to either. But, like Pasteur, when he was young, or anyone else who has something to do, I wish I had more money for my literary experiments." William Carlos Williams, c. 1931

Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

The poet thinks with his poem...

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected. A world lost, a world unsuspected beckons to new places and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness .

Beautiful thing, my dove, unable and all who are windblown, touched by the fire and unable, a roar that (soundless) drowns the sense with its reiteration unwilling to lie in its bed and sleep and sleep, sleep in its dark bed. Summer! it is summer .—and still the roar in his mind is unabated

Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect?

the faucet of June that rings the triangle of the air

unsignificantly off the coast there was a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning

After some years of varied experience with the bodies of the rich and the poor a man finds little to distinguish between them, bulks them as one and bases his working judgements on other matters.

they are mystified by certain instances.

the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires—unroused.

I had sent [the magazine] a batch of poems which they turned down flat. I was furious. Floss [my wife] said, 'If I were the editor of that magazine *I* would turn down what *you* sent.' So *she* picked a batch and they accepted them *all*.

According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are dissassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transportation into another medium, the imagination.

The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill.

If anything of the moment results — so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it.

Yet there is no return: rolling up out of chaos, a nine months' wonder, the city the man, an identity—it can't be otherwise—an interpenetration, both ways. Rolling up! Obverse, reverse; the drunk the sober; the illustrious the gross; one. In ignorance a certain knowledge and knowledge, undispersed, its own undoing.

ARRIVAL 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...!

Winter Trees All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches. Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold.

In my life the furniture eats me the chairs, the floor the walls which heard your sobs drank up my emotion- they which alone know everything and snitched on us in the morning-

To hell with you and your poetry — You will rot and be blown through the next solar system with the rest of the gases —

I asked him, What do you do? He smiled patiently, The typical American question. In Europe they would ask, What are you doing? Or, What are you doing now? What do I do? I listen, to the water falling. (No sound of it here but with the wind!) This is my entire occupation.

Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr. Paterson has gone away to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees his thoughts sitting and standing. His thoughts alight and scatter– Who are these people (how complex the mathematic) among whom I see myself in the regularly ordered plateglass of his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?