There is nothing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose-red grasses and you-in your apron hurrying to catch-say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.

— William Carlos Williams

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

— William Carlos Williams

To imitate nature involves the verb to do. To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly: Shakespeare's mirror is all that is needed for it. But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature, or we discover in ourselves nature's active part.

— William Carlos Williams

Unsignificantlyoff the coast there was splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning

— William Carlos Williams

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned, but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

— William Carlos Williams

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

— William Carlos Williams

What can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.

— William Carlos Williams

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?

— 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

You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and Attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.

— William Carlos Williams