Top 120 William Carlos Williams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “When I am alone I am happy.”

— William Carlos Williams

3. “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

4. “No ideas but in things.”

— William Carlos Williams

5. “Time is a storm in which we are all lost.”

— William Carlos Williams

6. “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

7. “A poem is a small machine made out of words.”

— William Carlos Williams

8. “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

9. “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”

— William Carlos Williams

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

— William Carlos Williams

11. “That which is possible is inevitable.”

— William Carlos Williams

12. “It’s a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!”

— William Carlos Williams

13. “What power has love but forgiveness?”

— William Carlos Williams

14. “It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.”

— William Carlos Williams

15. “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

16. “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

17. “Say it, no ideas but in things – nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident – split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained – secret – into the body of the light!”

— William Carlos Williams

18. “In summer, the song sings itself.”

— William Carlos Williams

19. “It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.”

— William Carlos Williams

20. “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.”

— William Carlos Williams

21. “As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world.”

— William Carlos Williams

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

— William Carlos Williams

23. “The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

— William Carlos Williams

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood’s edge.”

— William Carlos Williams

29. “Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again.”

— William Carlos Williams

30. “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

31. “My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.”

— William Carlos Williams

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

— William Carlos Williams

33. “Empty pockets make empty heads.”

— William Carlos Williams

34. “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

35. “Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.”

— William Carlos Williams

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

— William Carlos Williams

37. “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

38. “A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.”

— William Carlos Williams

39. “But the sea which no one tends is also a garden.”

— William Carlos Williams

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.”

— William Carlos Williams

44. “History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.”

— William Carlos Williams

45. “The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.”

— William Carlos Williams

46. “I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.”

— William Carlos Williams

47. “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

48. “The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.”

— William Carlos Williams

49. “A new music is a new mind.”

— William Carlos Williams

50. “The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.”

— William Carlos Williams