Wallace Stevens Quotes

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

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.

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.

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

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

True villains are extremely photogenic.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.

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.

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.

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

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

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

Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.

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

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

God and the imagination are one.

Imagination is the will of things. . . .

All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

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

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

How red the rose that is the soldier

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

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

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

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.

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

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

Like the Sweetness of Gardenias Mother, you died 15 years ago. pain, a rapier, cut until, finally, there was just peace like the sweetness of gardenias in the crystal vase on your yellow kitchen table. so fragrant. your voice lingers in my ear reminding, scolding, guiding a pleasant mantra of tenderness, magic words that move my palms, your palms. together we are molding, helping, creating. in the mirror I see your eyes, your beautiful brown circles looking back, so radiant. "don't forget me," you whispered the day you died. I won't.

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

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

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

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

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Trees Trees, proud standing people stretching fingertips to the sky, reaching, praying glorious attention, breathing light. strength shelter timeless confidence bending and firm comforting rooted chorus line dancing with the moon, the wind, the clouds framing bursts of stars tender rugged celebration absorbing and releasing life each holy branch holding the power of the Universe. There.

Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.

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

It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.

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