Wallace Stevens Quotes

True villains are extremely photogenic.

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.

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 summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

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

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

I do not know which to prefer - The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

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.

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

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.

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

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.

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

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

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

The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.

Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

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?

Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

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

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.

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

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

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

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

God and the imagination are one.

Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Disillusion is the last illusion.

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

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.

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

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

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

The imperfect is our paradise.

I was the world in which I walked.

I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

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

Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.

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