Wallace Stevens Quotes

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.

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

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

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.

The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

the windy sky Cries out a literate despair.

How red the rose that is the soldier

Life is the elimination of what is dead.

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.

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

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.

The mind can never be satisfied.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

I am what is around me.

Next to love is the desire for love.

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.

It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.

I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.

We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.

The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

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

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

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

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

At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

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

Make the visible a little hard to see.

Anything is beautiful if you say it is.

All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.

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

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.

The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.

I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.

It is the belief and not the god that counts.

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

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.

Imagination is the will of things. . . .

It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

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.

It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.