Quote

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

William Carlos Williams

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Carlos Williams
Age: 79 †
Born: 1883
Born: September 17
Died: 1963
Died: March 4
Autobiographer
Literary Critic
Physician
Physician Writer
Poet
Writer
Art
Realism
Imagination

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

Image
THE THOUGHTFUL LOVER Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it. But it will keep—or it is not worth the having. Never start anything you can't finish— However do not lose faith because you are starved! She loves you she says. Believe it —tomorrow. But today the particulars of poetry that difficult art require your whole attention.
William Carlos Williams
Image
To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means Sniffing the trees, just another dog among a lot of dogs.What else is there? And to do?
William Carlos Williams
Image
Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Your knees are a southern breeze.
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
Image
What love is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.
William Carlos Williams
Image
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.
William Carlos Williams
Image
[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
Image
Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.
William Carlos Williams
Image
through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones.
William Carlos Williams
Image
Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.
William Carlos Williams
Image
A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.
William Carlos Williams
Image
One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken.
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world
William Carlos Williams
Image
Without invention nothing is well-spaced.
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
Image
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