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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
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William Carlos Williams
Age: 79 †
Born: 1883
Born: September 17
Died: 1963
Died: March 4
Autobiographer
Literary Critic
Physician
Physician Writer
Poet
Writer
Rose
Unless
Imagination
Startle
Upon
Anew
Things
Feeds
Trivial
Scent
Instant
More quotes by William Carlos Williams
we, in that instant, lost, breathless to be witnesses, as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire.
William Carlos Williams
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
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
Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse-- at least, blinded by the light, young love is.
William Carlos Williams
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
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
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
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow
William Carlos Williams
[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
William Carlos Williams
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
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
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
and there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away.
William Carlos Williams
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
Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.
William Carlos Williams
It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.
William Carlos Williams
Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Your knees are a southern breeze.
William Carlos Williams
Minds like beds always made up (more stony than a shore) unwilling or unable.
William Carlos Williams
Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!
William Carlos Williams
The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.
William Carlos Williams
