Quotes About Expression

A house is sometimes wine. It is sometimes more than a skin.

You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.

Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us. It is our inability to communicate to another how we are locked within ourselves, unable to say the simplest thing of importance to one another, any of us, even the most valuable, that makes our lives like those of a litter of kittens in a wood-pile.

A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.

The poet thinks with his poem...

If anything of the moment results — so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it.

The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through the layers of demoded words and shapes.

Silence can be complex too, but you do not get far with silence.

If you are not already too blind too deaf, too lost in the past to know or to care— I will write a book about you— making you live (in a book!) as you still desperately want to live— to live always—unforgiving

Sweep the house clean here is one who has gone up (though problematically) to heaven, blindly by force of the facts- a clean sweep is one way of expressing it-

perhaps it is all art and Barnum our one genius (in the arts) on the moral plane

Poets are dammed but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

he sees squirming roots trampled under the foliage of his mind by the holiday crowds as by the feet of the straining minister. From his eyes sparrows start and sing. His ears are toadstools, his fingers have begun to sprout leaves (his voice is drowned under the falls) . Poet, poet! sing your song, quickly! or not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out your kind.

Poets are damned, but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similies and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious recording of the day's experiences freshly and with the appearance of reality – This sort of thing is seriously to the development of any ability in a man, it fastens him down, makes him a – It destroys, makes nature an accessory to the particular theory he is following, it blinds him to his world, –

I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! — William Carlos Williams, from "Danse Russe," The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939 , edited by Christopher MacGowan.

But though I have felt free only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position. So most of my life has been lived in hell -- a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear

I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! from "Danse Russe

Voting represented no rational process, but was simply traditional in certain societies for obtaining consensus and expressing the will of a group. The vote expressed more about the committee or college than it did about the elected person.

Music hath charms to sooth a savage breast.

All well bred persons lie – Besides, you are a woman; you must never speak what you think…

She liked the words; they satisfied her famine for phrases.

A quote is just a tattoo on the tongue.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.