Wallace Stevens Quotes - Page 3

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Cold is our element and winter's air Brings voices as of lions coming down.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called "standing people. . . ."

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

It was autumn and falling stars Covered the shrivelled forms Crouched in the moonlight.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

• Wallace Stevens / Poet

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow