Wallace Stevens Quotes
It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go.
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.
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.
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.
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.
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.'
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
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.
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.
I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
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.
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
