Selected Poems Quotes
"The only universal is the local as savages, artists and—to a lesser extent—peasants know."
"Perhaps Pound overstates the ‘roughness’ of Williams, but, in pointing out the ‘jerks, balks, outblurts and jump-overs,’ he has arrived at one of the earliest and most accurate formulations of what Williams’s verse was about."
"The good walker should be able to change pace, stop, start, turn, step up or down, twist or stoop, easily and quickly, without losing balance or rhythm."
"The rose is obsolete but each petal ends in an edge, the double facet cementing the grooved columns of air—The edge cuts without cutting meets—nothing—renews itself in metal or porcelain—whither? It ends—"
"so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens."
"Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze."
"It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off."
"No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car."
"The crowd at the ball game is moved uniformly by a spirit of uselessness which delights them—"
"I must tell you this young tree whose round and firm trunk between the wet pavement and the gutter (where water is trickling) rises bodily into the air with one undulant thrust half its height—"
"The universality of things draws me toward the candy with melon flowers that open about the edge of refuse proclaiming without accent the quality of the farmer’s shoulders and his daughter’s accidental skin, so sweet with clover and the small yellow cinquefoil in the parched places."
"New England is a condition—of bedrooms whose electricity is brickish or made into T beams—They dangle them."
"Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold"
"The alphabet of the trees is fading in the song of the leaves"
"There are no perfect waves—Your writings are a sea full of misspellings and faulty sentences."
"Flowers through the window lavender and yellow changed by white curtains—Smell of cleanliness—"
"The sea will wash in but the rocks—jagged ribs riding the cloth of foam or a knob or pinnacles with gannets—are the stubborn man."
"Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless."
"The mind is the cause of our distresses but of it we can build anew."
"Love is that common tone shall raise his fiery head and sound his note."
"Every day that I go out to my car I walk through a garden and wish often that Aristotle had gone on to a consideration of the dithyrambic poem—or that his notes had survived"
"Women are not alone in that. At least while this healing odor is abroad one can write a poem."
"Is there a sound addressed not wholly to the ear?"
"It is a principle of music to repeat the theme. Repeat and repeat again, as the pace mounts."
"Our dreams have been assaulted by a memory that will not sleep."
"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish."
"We are only mortal but being mortal can defy our fate."
"The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together."
"This sparrow who comes to sit at my window is a poetic truth more than a natural one."
"Love that is a stone endlessly in flight, so long as stone shall last bearing the chisel’s stroke."
"Without invention nothing is well spaced, unless the mind change."
"The imagination soars, as a voice beckons, a thunderous voice, endless—as sleep."
"Without invention the line will never again take on its ancient divisions when the word, a supple word, lived in it, crumbled now to chalk."
"The bomb puts an end to all that. I am reminded that the bomb also is a flower dedicated howbeit to our destruction."
"There is no power so great as love which is a sea, which is a garden—as enduring as the verses of that blind old man destined to live forever."
"Memory is a kind of accomplishment, a sort of renewal even an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places inhabited by hordes heretofore unrealized."
"No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected."
"With evening, love wakens though its shadows which are alive by reason of the sun shining—"
"Love without shadows stirs now beginning to waken as night advances."
"For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation—a descent follows, endless and indestructible."
"The blood is still and indifferent, the face does not ache nor sweat soil nor the mouth thirst. Now love might enjoy its play and nothing disturb the full octave of its run."
"A cool of books will sometimes lead the mind to libraries of a hot afternoon, if books can be found cool to the sense to lead the mind away."
"Drawn from the streets we break off our minds’ seclusion and are taken up by the books’ winds, seeking, seeking down the wind."
"And there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away."
"Beautiful thing, my dove, unable and all who are windblown, touched by the fire and unable, a roar that (soundless) drowns the sense with its reiteration."
"Flowers have always been his friends, even in paintings and tapestries which have lain through the past in museums jealously guarded, treated against moths."
"They draw him imperiously to witness them, make him think of bus schedules and how to avoid the irreverent— to refresh himself at the sight direct from the 12th century."