Williams Carlos Williams Quotes

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.

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

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

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

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

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.

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.

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

Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.

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

But the sea which no one tends is also a garden

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

That which is possible is inevitable.

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.

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt?