William Carlos Williams quotes

William Carlos Williams was an American poet and physician, recognized for his modernist and imagist contributions to literature. His innovative writing style emphasized clear, direct language and focused on everyday life in America. He influenced generations of poets with his distinctive voice and devotion to both medicine and poetry. Here are 99 of his quotes:

That which is possible is inevitable.

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 set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way.

William Carlos Williams

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

William Carlos Williams

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

William Carlos Williams

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

William Carlos Williams

Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.

William Carlos Williams

I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

William Carlos Williams

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

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

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

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

William Carlos Williams

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

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

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

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

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

The pure products of America go crazy.

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

It's a strange courage you give me ancient star:Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!

William Carlos Williams

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

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