Quotes from William Carlos Williams

Love without shadows stirs now beginning to waken as night advances. The descent made up of despairs and without accomplishment realizes a new awakening : which is a reversal of despair. For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation— a descent follows, endless and indestructible . Listen! — the pouring water! The dogs and trees conspire to invent a world—gone!

Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it! Run from it, if you will. So be it. (Winds that enshroud us in their folds—or no wind). So be it. Pull at the doors, of a hot afternoon, doors that the wind holds, wrenches from our arms—and hands. So be it. The Library is sanctuary to our fears. So be it. So be it.—the wind that has tripped us, pressed upon us, prurient or upon the prurience of our fears—laughter fading. So be it.

and so by your love the very sun itself is revived

And a church spire sketched on the sky, of sheet metal and open beams, to resemble a church spire

Black wind, I have poured my heart out to you until I am sick of it- Now I run my hand over you feeling the play of your body - the quiver of it's strength-

Filth and vermin though they shock the over-nice are imperfections of the flesh closely related in the just imagination of the poet to excessive cleanliness.

The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through the layers of demoded words and shapes.

In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which coming between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the screen at the movies. Sometimes there appears to be a maladjustment. The wish would be to see not floating visions of unknown purport but the imaginative qualities of the actual things being perceived accompany their gross vision in a slow dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this will not always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can.

Observe the jasmine lightness of the moon.

This is the sadness of the sea— waves like words, all broken— a sameness of lifting and falling mood. I lean watching the detail of brittle crest, the delicate imperfect foam, yellow weed one piece like another— There is no hope—if not a coral island slowly forming to wait for birds to drop the seeds will make it habitable

Ah, Madam, what good are your thoughts romantic but true beside this gaiety of the sun and that huge appetite? Look! from a glass pitcher she serves clear water to the white chickens. What are your memories beside that purity?

Silence can be complex too, but you do not get far with silence.

It is as though you looked down from above at me—not with what they would describe as pride but the same that is in me: a sort of shame that the world should see you as I see you, a somewhat infantile creature— without subtlety— defenseless.

Our dreams have been assaulted by a memory that will not sleep

If you are not already too blind too deaf, too lost in the past to know or to care— I will write a book about you— making you live (in a book!) as you still desperately want to live— to live always—unforgiving

Clean is he alone after whom stream the broken pieces of the city— flying apart at his approaches

prose has to do with the fact of an emotion ; poetry has to do with the dynamisation of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination. prose : statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectua states, data of all sorts - technical expositions, jargon of all sorts - fictional and other - poetry : new form dealt with as a reality in itself.

Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself - sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity.

The sea that encloses her young. body ula lu la lu is the sea of many arms - The blazing secrecy of noon is undone and and and the broken sand is the sound of love -

Vast and grey, the sky is a simulacrum to all but him whose days are vast and grey, and? In the tall, dried grasses a goat stirs with nozzle searching the ground. ?my head is in the air but who am I . . ? And amazed my heart leaps at the thought of love vast and grey yearning silently over me.

Sweep the house clean here is one who has gone up (though problematically) to heaven, blindly by force of the facts- a clean sweep is one way of expressing it-

the sky goes out if you should fail.

The province of the poem is the world. When the sun rises, it rises in the poem and when it sets darkness comes down and the poem is dark

perhaps it is all art and Barnum our one genius (in the arts) on the moral plane