158 Quotes by 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.

Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again.

Love without shadows stirs now beginning to waken as night advances. The descent made up of despairs and without accomplishment realizes a new awakening : which is a reversal of despair. For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation – a descent follows, endless and indestructible. Listen! – the pouring water! The dogs and trees conspire to invent a world – gone!

My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.

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.

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.

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.

The pure products of America go crazy.

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned.