Wallace Stevens Quotes

Money is a kind of poetry.

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

The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.

Poetry is a means of redemption.

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

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

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.

In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American -- on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

God is gracious to some very peculiar people.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

Thought tends to collect in pools.

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

It is the belief and not the god that counts.

The mind can never be satisfied.

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio--remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales--we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

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.

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

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

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

Life is not free from its forms.

Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.

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.

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

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.

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need for imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?

LIGHT FROM WITHIN my friend, cancer got you damn it: you had it beat for seven years at least. how did it come back? Why all that pain. again. and you, such a fighter you fought me over and over with tears and words and promises. you fought for me with honesty and a light so bright it hurts my heart. sweet lorna. at peace now finally no more battles, just light from within a flickering candle in the dark burns with you.