William Carlos Williams Quotes About Imagination

Quotes about: Imagination

• 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

  Reality, Air, Birds Wings

  William Carlos Williams (1971). “Imaginations”, p.150, New Directions Publishing

• There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.

  William Carlos Williams

  Order, Imagination, Usual

  William Carlos Williams (1971). “Imaginations”, p.35, New Directions Publishing

• [History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.

  William Carlos Williams

  History, Imagination, Soul

  William Carlos Williams (1978). “A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists”, New Directions Publishing Corporation

• 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

  Writing, Reality, Imagination

• To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.

  William Carlos Williams

  Imagination, Moments, Eternity

  William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.178, New Directions Publishing

• 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

  Love, Sorry, Selfish

  William Carlos Williams, Charles Tomlinson (1985). “Selected Poems”, p.215, New Directions Publishing

• Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

  William Carlos Williams

  Imagination, Mind, Use

  William Carlos Williams (1971). “Imaginations”, p.39, New Directions Publishing

• The only realism in art is of the imagination.

  William Carlos Williams

  Art, Imagination, Realism

  William Carlos Williams (1971). “Imaginations”, p.15, New Directions Publishing

• There is no thing 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

  Son, Clouds, Wind

  William Carlos Williams, “Kora In Hell: Improvisations XXVII”

• 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.

  William Carlos Williams

  Imagination, Listening, Use

• The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless-unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew.

  William Carlos Williams

  Imagination, Rose, Scent

  William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.310, New Directions Publishing

• But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.

  William Carlos Williams

  Art, Lying, Writing

  William Carlos Williams (1920). “Kora in Hell: Improvisations”

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