“Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.”
Source: Paterson
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Famous William Carlos Williams Quotes
“Time is a storm in which we are all lost.”
Source: Selected essays
“beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.”
Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams
Source: Selected poems
“All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.”
Source: Asphodel, that Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems
“The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned”
Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962
Source: Selected essays
Source: Selected poems
“My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.”
Source: Paterson
Source: Pictures from Brueghel: Pulitzer Prize, Poetry
Source: I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet
“What power has love but forgiveness?”
Source: Illuminations: images by Oriole Farb Feshbach for the poem
“No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.”
Source: In the American Grain
Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams
“Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!”
Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams
Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962
Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams
“What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.”
Source: The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams
“Empty pockets make empty heads.”
Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962
“I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.”
Source: Early Poems
“The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.”
Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams
Source: The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams
Source: The William Carlos Williams Reader
Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams
“History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.”
Source: In the American Grain (Second Edition)
Source: The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams
“The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of”
Source: Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams
Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams
“O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.”
Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams
Source: Imaginations
“The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.”
Source: Pictures from Brueghel, and Other Poems: Collected Poems, 1950-1962