1. “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
2. “It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.” – William Carlos Williams
3. “Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell.” – William Carlos Williams
4. “I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artists unless one should scour the world you have the ground sense necessary.” – William Carlos Williams
5. “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
6. “I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.” – William Carlos Williams
7. “Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu’s famous dictum: ‘Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.’ All around me I see something very different, let us say – a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.” – William Carlos Williams
8. “Without invention nothing is well-spaced.” – William Carlos Williams
9. “The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill.” – William Carlos Williams
10. “Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us. It is our inability to communicate to another how we are locked within ourselves, unable to say the simplest thing of importance to one another, any of us, even the most valuable, that makes our lives like those of a litter of kittens in a wood-pile.” – William Carlos Williams
11. “Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.” – William Carlos Williams
12. “I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.” – William Carlos Williams
13. “A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.” – William Carlos Williams
14. “Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.” – William Carlos Williams
15. “It was the love of love, the love of swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of natural, of people, of animals, a love ingengering gentleness and goodness that moved meand that I saw in you.” – William Carlos Williams
16. “History must stay open, it is all humanity.” – William Carlos Williams
17. “To hell with everything I myself have ever written.” – William Carlos Williams
18. “The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.” – William Carlos Williams
19. “The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.” – William Carlos Williams
20. “What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?” – William Carlos Williams
21. “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.” – William Carlos Williams
22. “By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.” – William Carlos Williams
23. “It lives as pictures only can : by their power TO ESCAPE ILLUSION and stand between man and nature as saints once stood between man and the sky…” – William Carlos Williams
24. “It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.” – William Carlos Williams
25. “But love is unworldly, and nothing comes of it but love…” – William Carlos Williams
26. “As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world.” – William Carlos Williams
27. “A new world is only a new mind.” – William Carlos Williams
28. “The Library is desolation, it has a smell of its own of stagnation and death.” – William Carlos Williams
29. “It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.” – William Carlos Williams
30. “The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned.” – William Carlos Williams
31. “Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.” – William Carlos Williams
32. “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
33. “History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.” – William Carlos Williams
34. “It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.” – William Carlos Williams
35. “Love is that common tone shall raise his fiery head and sound his note.” – William Carlos Williams
36. “But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.” – William Carlos Williams
37. “Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.” – William Carlos Williams
38. “The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.” – William Carlos Williams
39. “I think these days when there is so little to believe in – – when the old loyalties – – God, country, and the hope of Heaven – – aren’t very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in – – someone who seems beautiful.” – William Carlos Williams
40. “Time is a storm in which we are all lost.” – William Carlos Williams
41. “I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.” – William Carlos Williams
42. “Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.” – William Carlos Williams
43. “The Moon, the dried weeds and the Pleiades – Seven feet tall the dark, dried weed stalks make a part of the night a red lace on the milky blue sky” – William Carlos Williams
44. “I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.” – William Carlos Williams
45. “The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.” – William Carlos Williams
46. “You’re a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?” – William Carlos Williams
47. “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
48. “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!” – William Carlos Williams
49. “That which is possible is inevitable.” – William Carlos Williams
50. “For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.” – William Carlos Williams
51. “No ideas but in things.” – William Carlos Williams
52. “A poem is a small machine made out of words.” – William Carlos Williams
53. “You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.” – William Carlos Williams
54. “There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don’t, you don’t. And that’s all there is to that.” – William Carlos Williams
55. “Nothing whips my blood like verse.” – William Carlos Williams
56. “In summer, the song sings itself.” – William Carlos Williams
57. “Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.” – William Carlos Williams
58. “A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.” – William Carlos Williams
59. “The poet thinks with his poem…” – William Carlos Williams
60. “Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.” – William Carlos Williams
61. “If anything of the moment results – so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it.” – William Carlos Williams
62. “Empty pockets make empty heads.” – William Carlos Williams
63. “Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr.” – William Carlos Williams
64. “So most of my life has been lived in hell.” – William Carlos Williams
65. “We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.” – William Carlos Williams
66. “When I am alone I am happy.” – William Carlos Williams
67. “The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.” – William Carlos Williams
68. “No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer’s error.” – William Carlos Williams
69. “No wreaths please – especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes – a few books perhaps.” – William Carlos Williams
70. “Your thighs are apple trees. Your knees are the southern breeze.” – William Carlos Williams
71. “My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.” – William Carlos Williams
72. “So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field.” – William Carlos Williams
73. “Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realise his wishes- Now that he can realise them, he must either change them or perish.” – William Carlos Williams
74. “O frost bitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches. Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine. The twigs conspire against you! Hear hem! They hold you from behind.” – William Carlos Williams
75. “Say it! No ideas but in things.” – William Carlos Williams
76. “The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.” – William Carlos Williams
77. “By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast – a cold wind.” – William Carlos Williams
78. “Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again.” – William Carlos Williams
79. “If there is progress then there is a novel.” – William Carlos Williams
80. “It’s just a moment, we die every night.” – William Carlos Williams
81. “For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.” – William Carlos Williams
82. “Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.” – William Carlos Williams
83. “Death will be late to bring us aid.” – William Carlos Williams
84. “It’s a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!” – William Carlos Williams
85. “The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” – William Carlos Williams
86. “Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood’s edge” – William Carlos Williams
87. “Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year.” – William Carlos Williams
88. “The pure products of America go crazy – mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.” – William Carlos Williams
89. “The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.” – William Carlos Williams
90. “Rot dead marigolds- an acre at a time! Gold are you?” – William Carlos Williams
91. “Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness.” – William Carlos Williams
92. “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
93. “All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.” – William Carlos Williams
94. “You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.” – William Carlos Williams
95. “Poets are dammed but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.” – William Carlos Williams
96. “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.” – William Carlos Williams
97. “First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don’t see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place – not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere.” – William Carlos Williams
98. “But the sea which no one tends is also a garden.” – William Carlos Williams
99. “And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom – feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind.” – William Carlos Williams
100. “THESE are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night.” – William Carlos Williams
101. “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” – William Carlos Williams
102. “To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.” – William Carlos Williams
103. “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
104. “Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly – to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut your grief in?” – William Carlos Williams
105. “There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.” – William Carlos Williams
106. “As birds’ wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.” – William Carlos Williams
107. “A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.” – William Carlos Williams
108. “Being an art form, verse cannot be “free” in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.” – William Carlos Williams
109. “Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.” – William Carlos Williams
110. “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.” – William Carlos Williams
111. “We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.” – William Carlos Williams
112. “the set pieces of your faces stir me – leading citizens – but not in the same way.” – William Carlos Williams
113. “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” – William Carlos Williams
114. “And this moral? As with the deformed Aesop, morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds.” – William Carlos Williams
115. “The only realism in art is of the imagination.” – William Carlos Williams
116. “If they give you lined paper, write the other way.” – William Carlos Williams
117. “For there is a wind or a ghost of wind in all books echoing the life there, a high wind that fills the tubes of the ear until we think we hear a wind, actual.” – William Carlos Williams
118. “Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect?” – William Carlos Williams
119. “Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.” – William Carlos Williams