158 Quotes by William Carlos Williams

History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.

No wreaths please – especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes – a few books perhaps.

Being an art form, verse cannot be “free” in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.

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.

The pure products of America go crazy – mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.

I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.

What “love” is I don’t know if it’s not the response of our deepest natures to one another.

For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.

In summer, the song sings itself.