William Carlos Williams Quotes

I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

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

Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.

We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

For the beginning is assuredly
the end- since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.

The pure products of America
go crazy...

...[] No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.