Top 100 Wallace Stevens Quotes
#1. People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.
Wallace Stevens
#2. We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
Wallace Stevens
#3. A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens
#4. Diaries are very futile. I must be all dream or all deed. It is quite impossible for me to express any of the beauty I feel to half the degree I feel it; and yet it is a great pleasure to seize an impression and lock it up in words: you feel as if you had it safe forever.
Wallace Stevens
#5. The stars are putting on their glittering belts,
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow's last embellishment
Wallace Stevens
#6. What is there in life except one's ideas,
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Wallace Stevens
#7. The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
Wallace Stevens
#10. From From the Journal of Crispin
There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams
That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs
Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not
The oncoming fantasies of better birth.
Wallace Stevens
#11. I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.
Wallace Stevens
#12. Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
Wallace Stevens
#13. To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
Wallace Stevens
#14. Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Wallace Stevens
#15. Beauty is momentary in the mind
The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.
Wallace Stevens
#16. At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.
Wallace Stevens
#17. Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
Wallace Stevens
#19. The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.
Wallace Stevens
#20. I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
Wallace Stevens
#22. Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
Wallace Stevens
#23. Day after day, throughout the winter,
We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
In a world of wind and frost ...
Wallace Stevens
#26. Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Wallace Stevens
#27. After the final no there come a yes, and on that yes a future world depends.
Wallace Stevens
#28. The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes
Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
Of machine within machine within machine.
Wallace Stevens
#30. A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.
Wallace Stevens
#31. Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination.
Wallace Stevens
#32. You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.
Wallace Stevens
#33. Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.
Wallace Stevens
#34. What is one man among so many men?
What are so many men in such a world?
Can one man think one thing and think it long?
Can one man be one thing and be it long?
Wallace Stevens
#35. In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
Wallace Stevens
#36. From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise
All you need,
To find poetry,
Is to look for it with a lantern.
Wallace Stevens
#38. I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it
was upon a hill.
Wallace Stevens
#39. Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
Wallace Stevens
#40. All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.
Wallace Stevens
#41. It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
Wallace Stevens
#43. Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens
#44. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
Wallace Stevens
#45. He thought often of the land from which he came,
How that whole country was a melon, pink
If seen rightly and yet a possible red.
Wallace Stevens
#46. The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.
Wallace Stevens
#48. If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
Wallace Stevens
#49. It was soldier's went marching over the rocks,
and still they came in watery flocks,
because it was spring and the birds had to come,
No doubt that soldier's had to be marching,
and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling
Wallace Stevens
#50. It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
Wallace Stevens
#51. Cold is our element and winter's air
Brings voices as of lions coming down.
Wallace Stevens
#52. Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
Wallace Stevens
#55. The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
Wallace Stevens
#56. Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
Wallace Stevens
#57. Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
#58. Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
Wallace Stevens
#59. Behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.
Wallace Stevens
#61. If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
Wallace Stevens
#62. The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.
Wallace Stevens
#63. Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace Stevens
#64. I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Wallace Stevens
#65. Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
Wallace Stevens
#66. To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
Wallace Stevens
#67. My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called "standing people ... "
Wallace Stevens
#69. The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
Wallace Stevens
#70. If the hero is not a person, the emblem
Of him, even if Xenophon, seems
To stand taller than a person stands, has
A wider brow, large and less human
Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body
Of a primitive.
Wallace Stevens
#71. As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Wallace Stevens
#72. Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.
Wallace Stevens
#73. Freedom is like a man who kills himself
Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife
Grows sharp in blood.
Wallace Stevens
#74. Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
Wallace Stevens
#75. The consolations of space are nameless things.
It was after the neurosis of winter. It was
In the genius of summer that they blew up
The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds.
It took all day to quieten the sky
And then to refill its emptiness again ...
Wallace Stevens
#76. Funest philosophers and ponderers,
Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
Wallace Stevens
#77. The lion sleeps in the sun.
its nose on its paws.
it can kill a man.
Wallace Stevens
#78. One ought not to hoard culture . It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
Wallace Stevens
#79. It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.
Wallace Stevens
#80. We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.
Wallace Stevens
#82. And what's above is in the past
As sure as all the angels are.
Wallace Stevens
#83. Who, then, are they, seated here?
Is the table a mirror in which they sit and look?
Are they men eating reflections of themselves?
Wallace Stevens
#84. Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
Wallace Stevens
#86. The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
Wallace Stevens
#87. They said, "You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.
Wallace Stevens
#91. The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Wallace Stevens
#92. There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.
Wallace Stevens
#93. Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the
moon.
It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he
could be told.
It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.
It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.
Wallace Stevens
#94. After a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
Wallace Stevens
#95. Of what is real I say,
Is it the old, the roseate parent or
The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else
The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
Wallace Stevens
#96. It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.
Wallace Stevens
#98. It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.
Wallace Stevens
#100. It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.
Wallace Stevens
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