Wallace Stevens Quotes

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.

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

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.

The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.

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

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

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.

It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.

I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.

Life is the elimination of what is dead.

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

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

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.

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.'

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

The word is the making of the world

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

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.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.

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

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

I was the world in which I walked.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

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

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.

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 imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

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

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.

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

God is in me or else is not at all.

A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

The mind is smaller than the eye.

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

Anything is beautiful if you say it is.

The imperfect is our paradise.

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

Make the visible a little hard to see.

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.