Ck Williams Quotes

Expectation is the root of all heartache. —William Shakespeare

This is the wisdom of art, the knowledge that beauty perhaps is the one undeniably unique attribute of the human.

Wasn't I rapt? Wasn't I ravished?

To do a great right, do a little wrong. —William Shakespeare

Maybe shy is when you're lonely and you don't think anybody can help you.

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? —William Shakespeare

Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air. By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

I believe how you looked was supposed to mean, something graver, more substantial: I'd gaze at my poor face and think, "It's still not there." Apparently I still do. What isn't there? Beauty? Not likely. Wisdom? Less. Is how we live or try to live supposed to embellish us? All I see is the residue of my other, failed faces. But maybe what we're after is just a less abrasive regard: not "It's still not there," but something like "Come in, be still.

you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? —William Shakespeare

Better three hours too soon than a minute too late. —William Shakespeare

The devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose. —William Shakespeare

Though she may be little, she is fierce. —William Shakespeare LANA

Sometimes I almost go hours without crying, Then I feel if I don't, I'll go insane. It can seem her whole life was her dying. She tried so hard, then she tired of trying; Now I'm tired, too, of trying to explain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. The anxiety, the rage, the denying; Though I never blamed her for my pain, It can seem her whole life was her dying. And mine was struggling to save her; prying, Conniving: it was the chemistry in her brain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. If I said she was easy, I'd be lying; The lens between her and the world was stained: It can seem her whole life was her dying. But the fact, the fact, is stupefying: Her absence tears at me like a chain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. It can seem her whole life was her dying. - Villanelle for a Suicide's Mother

I envied the sons their life in the country. I wasn’t even jealous of how at home they were in the fields and woods and barns; of how they could do so many things I couldn’t, drive tractors, take apart and fix motors, pluck eggs from under a hen, shove their way into a stall with a stubborn horse pushing back: I just marveled at it all, and wanted it. They and the boys who lived on farms near them were also so enviably at ease in their bodies: what back in the city would be taken as a slouch of disinterest, here was an expression of physical grace. No need to be tense when everything so readily submitted to your efficiently minimal gestures: hoisting bales of hay into a loft, priming a recalcitrant pump … Something else there was as well, something more elusive: perhaps that they lived so much of the time in a world of wild, poignant odors—mown grass, the redolent pines, even the tang of manure and horse-piss-soaked hay. Just the thought of those sensory elations inflicted me with a feeling I still have to exert myself to repress that I was squandering my time, wasting what I knew already were irretrievable clutches of years, now hecatombs of years, trapped in my trivial, stifling life.

Last year in the region where we live part of the year there were violent windstorms, whole forests were leveled, two- and three-hundred-year-old trees torn up by the roots and tossed aside, houses sliced almost in half by the once-sheltering giants flung down through their roofs. Yesterday another storm, powerful but less so, took down no trees. The ground, though, is littered with leaves, as though autumn had arrived, but the leaves are still green, still alive, many torn away in clumps, with the twigs still intact that attached them to their branches. There’s something disconsolate about them—the desiccated leaves of autumn always appear to have found the place to which they’ve been destined, but these don’t seem to grasp what’s happened to them: they lie on the ground at awkward angles, like things wounded that haven’t completely given in to death and don’t know yet they must.

Lost Wax" My love gives me some wax, so for once instead of words I work at something real; I knead until I see emerge a person, a protagonist; but I must overwork my wax, it loses it's resiliency, comes apart in crumbs. I take another block; this work, I think, will be a self; I can feel it forming, brow and brain; perhaps it will be me, perhaps, if I can create myself, I'll be able to amend myself; my wax, though, freezes this time, fissures, splits. Words or wax, no end to our self-shaping, our forlorn awareness at the end of which is only more awareness. Was ever truth so malleable? Arid, inadhesive bits of matter. What might heal you? Love. What might make you whole? Love. My love.

Neither that I picked my nose compulsively, daydreamed through my boring classes, masturbated, once in a condom I stole from my father’s drawer, enraptured by its half-chemical, half-organic odor; nor my obsessions with smells in general, earth, dead rats, even my baby sister’s diaper shit, which made me pleasantly retch; nor that I filched money from my mother for candy and so knew early on I was a thief, a sneak, a liar: none of that convinced me I was “bad,” subversive and perverse, so much as that purveyor of morality—parent, teacher, maybe even treacherous friend—who inculcated the unannulable conviction in me that the most egregious wrong, of which I was clearly already despicably, irredeemably guilty, was my abiding involvement with myself. Even now, only rarely am I able to convince myself that my reluctance to pass on my most secret reflections, meditations, theorizings, all the modes by which I manage to distract myself, arises from my belief that out of my appalling inner universe nothing anyway could possibly be extracted, departicularized, and offered as an instance of anything at all to anyone else.

Neither that I picked my nose compulsively, daydreamed through my boring classes, masturbated, once in a condom I stole from my father’s drawer, enraptured by its half-chemical, half-organic odor; nor my obsessions with smells in general, earth, dead rats, even my baby sister’s diaper shit, which made me pleasantly retch; nor that I filched money from my mother for candy and so knew early on I was a thief, a sneak, a liar: none of that convinced me I was “bad,” subversive and perverse, so much as that purveyor of morality—parent, teacher, maybe even treacherous friend—who inculcated the unannulable conviction in me that the most egregious wrong, of which I was clearly already despicably, irredeemably guilty, was my abiding involvement with myself. Even now, only rarely am I able to convince myself that my reluctance to pass on my most secret reflections, meditations, theorizings, all the modes by which I manage to distract myself, arises from my belief that out of my appalling inner universe nothing anyway could possibly be extracted, departicularized, and offered as an instance of anything at all to anyone else. An overrefined sense of generosity, I opine; an unwillingness to presume upon others by hauling them into this barn, this sty, where mental vermin gobble, lust, excrete. Not a lack of sensitivity but a specialization of that lobe of it which most appreciates the unspoken wish of others: to stay free of that rank habitation within me I call “me.” Really, though: to consider one’s splendid self-made self as after all benevolent, propelled by secret altruism? Aren’t I, outer mouth and inner masticating self-excusing sublimations, still really back there in my neither-land? Aren’t I still a thief, stealing from some hoard of language trash to justify my inner stink? Maybe let it go, just let it go.

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?—William Shakespeare

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. —William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

Adopting a “power pose” for one minute increases testosterone, decreases cortisol, and increases feelings of power and tolerance for risk—important biological determinants of confidence.A power pose is simply body language that is open and expansive, with chest out, shoulders back, and eyes looking straight ahead. Think Superman stance or William Wallace stepping out from the front line as if to say, “Come at me, bro.

She hated herself when she had to nag, but she didn’t see any other way. So I asked her to stage the following: on a Sunday, when he was home, she took out the toolbox and headed up to the bathroom door where she started to make all kinds of noises with the tools. It took William less than a minute to rush in and ask, “What are you doing, honey?” Rebekah replied, “Oh nothing, I’m going to fix the doorknob.” He immediately took over the tools and helped her. The door was fixed within ten minutes. No nagging needed.

The attempt and not the deed confounds us. —William Shakespeare

The course of true love never did run smooth. —William Shakespeare

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones. —William Shakespeare

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind. —William Shakespeare

all of [her] is brushed with light, so much glare she seems to singe the very tissue of remembrance. — C.K. Williams, from “Combat,” Poems 1963-1983 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988)

What would release be? Being forgiven? No, never forgiven, never only forgiven.

Love: Beginnings" They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so much frank need and want, so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring entity and unity they make— her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her laughter at his laughter, he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness of being craved so, she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again, cheek, lip, shoulder, brow, every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring back in flame into the sexual— that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, that filling of the heart, the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting again, stamping in its stall.

…a weeping, unhealable wound,

Though she may be little, she is fierce. —William Shakespeare