William Carlos Williams quotes

" The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost. " # Stress

" If they give you lined paper, write the other way. " # Writers and Writing

" In summer the song sings itself " # Song and Singing # Love # Music

" It is at the edge of a petal that love waits. " # Love

" 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. " # Poetry and Poets # Science and Scientists # Arts and Artists

" Empty pockets make empty heads. " # Poverty and The Poor

" What power has love but forgiveness In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise " # Forgiveness # Love # Power

" The perfect man of action, is the suicide. " # Suicide

" By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency. " # Language

" What is the use of reading the common news of the day, the tragic deaths and abuses of daily living, when for over half a lifetime we have known that they must have occurred just as they have occurred given the conditions that cause them? There is no light in it. It is trivial fill-gap. We know the plane will crash, the train be derailed. And we know why. No one cares, no one can care. We get the news and discount it, we are quite right in doing so. It is trivial. But the haunted news I get from some obscure patient's eyes is not trivial. It is profound. " # Children # Books - Reading # Death and Dying