Quotes by William Carlos Williams

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?

For the beginning is assuredlythe end- since we know nothing, pureand simple, beyondour own complexities.

I think all writing is a disease. You cant stop it.

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

To imitate nature involves the verb to do. To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly: Shakespeares mirror is all that is needed for it. But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover in ourselves natures active part.

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. Ill write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and itll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

What power has love but forgiveness?In other wordsby its interventionwhat has been donecan be undone.What good is it otherwise?

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

But the seawhich no one tendsis also a garden

I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. Its words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.

A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.

Their story, yours, mine - its what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.

The HurricaneThe tree lay downon the garage roof and stretched, You have your heaven, it said, go to it.

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

There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.

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.

But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter therell be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.