William Carlos Williams: That Which is Impossible is Inevitable

“Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.”
― William Carlos Williams

“At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.”
― William Carlos Williams

“If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.”
― William Carlos Williams

“That which is possible is inevitable.”
― William Carlos Williams

“It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.”
― William Carlos Williams

“A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol. 2: 1939-1962

“As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“THE THOUGHTFUL LOVER

Deny yourself all
half things. Have it
or leave it.

But it will keep—or
it is not worth
the having.

Never start
anything you can't
finish—

However do not lose
faith because you
are starved!

She loves you
she says. Believe it
—tomorrow.

But today
the particulars
of poetry

that difficult art
require
your whole attention.”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol. 2: 1939-1962

“Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.”
― William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell

“All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.”
― William Carlos Williams

“beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.”
― William Carlos Williams

“I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.”
― William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays

“Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.”
― William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell


“For the beginning is assuredly
the end- since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.”
― William Carlos Williams

“Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“A new music is a new mind.”
― William Carlos Williams