Top 120 William Carlos Williams Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage!”

— William Carlos Williams

55. “Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.”

— William Carlos Williams

56. “The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of.”

— William Carlos Williams

57. “What “love” is I don’t know if it’s not the response of our deepest natures to one another.”

— William Carlos Williams

58. “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

59. “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

60. “Death will be late to bring us aid.”

— William Carlos Williams

61. “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

62. “History must stay open, it is all humanity.”

— William Carlos Williams

63. “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

64. “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

65. “The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned.”

— William Carlos Williams

66. “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

67. “Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind – But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested – the snow is covered with broken seed husks and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty.”

— William Carlos Williams

68. “Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.”

— William Carlos Williams

69. “But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents.”

— William Carlos Williams

70. “Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them.”

— William Carlos Williams

71. “The only realism in art is of the imagination.”

— William Carlos Williams

72. “The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.”

— William Carlos Williams

73. “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

74. “Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.”

— William Carlos Williams

75. “Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.”

— William Carlos Williams

76. “For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.”

— William Carlos Williams

77. “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

78. “The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.”

— William Carlos Williams

79. “The perfect man of action, is the suicide.”

— William Carlos Williams

80. “The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless-unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew.”

— William Carlos Williams

81. “Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.”

— William Carlos Williams

82. “Without invention nothing is well-spaced.”

— William Carlos Williams

83. “So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field.”

— William Carlos Williams

84. “In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which coming between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the screen at the movies. Sometimes there appears to be a maladjustment. The wish would be to see not floating visions of unknown purport but the imaginative qualities of the actual things being perceived accompany their gross vision in a slow dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this will not always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can.”

— William Carlos Williams

85. “We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.”

— William Carlos Williams

86. “Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.”

— William Carlos Williams

87. “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

88. “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

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

— William Carlos Williams

90. “Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.”

— William Carlos Williams

91. “I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.”

— William Carlos Williams

92. “The pure products of America go crazy.”

— William Carlos Williams

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

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

— William Carlos Williams

97. “O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.”

— William Carlos Williams

98. “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

99. “Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect?”

— William Carlos Williams

100. “Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.”

— William Carlos Williams