158 Quotes by 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.

You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.

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

Rot dead marigolds- an acre at a time! Gold are you?

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?

You’re a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.

Empty pockets make empty heads.

You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.