William Carlos Williams

One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: the only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.

— William Carlos Williams

It is in tune with the tempo of life — scattered yet welded into the whole, — broken, yet woven together.

— William Carlos Williams

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

— William Carlos Williams

Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

— William Carlos Williams

It's a strange world made up of disappointments for the most part. I keep writing largely because I get a satisfaction from it which can't be duplicated elsewhere. It fills the moments which otherwise are either terrifying or depressed. Not that I live that way, work too quiets me. My chief dissatisfaction with myself at the moment is that I don't seem to be able to lose myself in what I have to do as I should like to.

— William Carlos Williams

Why do we live? Most of us need the very thing we never ask for. We talk about revolution as if it was peanuts. What we need is some frank thinking and a few revolutions in our own guts; to hell with what most of the sons of bitches that I know and myself along with them if I don't take hold of myself and turn about when I need to — or go ahead further if that's the game.

— William Carlos Williams

Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.

— William Carlos Williams

My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. … it filled me with soul satisfying joy.

— William Carlos Williams

There's a lot of bastards out there!

— William Carlos Williams

I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my poetry.

— William Carlos Williams

The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.

— William Carlos Williams

Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.

— William Carlos Williams

So different, this manIn a field.

— William Carlos Williams

Lift your flowers and scorn greyness!

— William Carlos Williams

The earth cracks and if you should fail.

— William Carlos Williams

Why do I write today? old Florentine oak.

— William Carlos Williams

the set pieces in the same way.

— William Carlos Williams

I lie here thinking of you:— is upon the world!

— William Carlos Williams

It's a strange courage toward which you lend no part!

— William Carlos Williams

Brother! dreams are not a bad thing.

— William Carlos Williams

Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

— William Carlos Williams

By the road to the contagious hospital northeast — a cold wind.

— William Carlos Williams

The pure products of America go crazy —

— William Carlos Williams

Among the rain through the dark city.

— William Carlos Williams

Old age is piping of plenty.

— William Carlos Williams

I have eaten and so cold

— William Carlos Williams

He's come out of the man

— William Carlos Williams

Your case has been reviewed by high-minded pimps to tradition —

— William Carlos Williams

It's all you deserve. You've got the cash, ahead —

— William Carlos Williams

These lower than night

— William Carlos Williams

The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.

— William Carlos Williams

Who isn’t frustrated and does not prove it by his actions — if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.

— William Carlos Williams

A man isn’t a block that remains stationary though the psychologists treat him so — and most take an insane pride in believing it. Consistency! He varies; Hamlet today, Caesar tomorrow; here, there, somewhere — if he is to retain his sanity, and why not? The arts have a complex relation to society. The poet isn’t a fixed phenomenon, no more is his work.

— William Carlos Williams

There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

— William Carlos Williams

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.

— William Carlos Williams

Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.

— William Carlos Williams

Let the snake wait under the rocks.

— William Carlos Williams

Not now. Love itself a flower     no peace.

— William Carlos Williams

But the sea

— William Carlos Williams

I think way

— William Carlos Williams

The cries of a dying dog to believe it.

— William Carlos Williams

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,

— William Carlos Williams

Only give me time,

— William Carlos Williams

Endless wealth,

— William Carlos Williams

The storm unfolds.

— William Carlos Williams

When I speak

— William Carlos Williams

The storm bursts

— William Carlos Williams

I come, my sweet,

— William Carlos Williams

    It is difficult

— William Carlos Williams

It is at the edge of the

— William Carlos Williams

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

— William Carlos Williams

We sit and talk,

— William Carlos Williams

You lethargic, waiting upon me,

— William Carlos Williams

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

— William Carlos Williams

so much depends

— William Carlos Williams

The business of love is

— William Carlos Williams

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

— William Carlos Williams

It is difficult

— William Carlos Williams