Wallace Stevens Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Quotes & Sayings

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It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea. — Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. — Wallace Stevens

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

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. — Wallace Stevens

Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the. — Wallace Stevens

And what's above is in the past
As sure as all the angels are. — Wallace Stevens

Make the visible a little hard to see. — Wallace Stevens

The grackles sing avant the spring
Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly.
They sing right puissantly. — Wallace Stevens

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time. — Wallace Stevens

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

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. — Wallace Stevens

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. — Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. — Wallace Stevens

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

Thought tends to collect in pools. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied. — Wallace Stevens

There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it. — Wallace Stevens

Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals. — Wallace Stevens

Realism is a corruption of reality. — Wallace Stevens

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

The muddy rivers of spring
Are snarling
Under the muddy skies.
The mind is muddy. — Wallace Stevens

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

A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry increases the feeling for reality. — Wallace Stevens

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms. — Wallace Stevens

One must read poetry with one's nerves. — Wallace Stevens

Consider the odd morphology of regret. — Wallace Stevens

The word is the making of the world — Wallace Stevens

From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist. — Wallace Stevens

We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession. — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, the body, it touches. — Wallace Stevens

The wound kills that does not bleed. — Wallace Stevens

It is the belief and not the god that counts. — Wallace Stevens

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

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

When I first heard Wallace Stevens' voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series. — Helen Vendler

Imagination ... is the irrepressible revolutionist. — Wallace Stevens

If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words. — Wallace Stevens

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

Poetry is the scholar's art. — Wallace Stevens

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

It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade. — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

Sometimes you must go too far to see what would suffice. — Rodney Ross

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

The imperfect is our paradise. — Wallace Stevens

The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world ... — Wallace Stevens

The night
Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
Night is the nature of man's interior world? — Wallace Stevens

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

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so. — Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow — Wallace Stevens

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon ... — Wallace Stevens

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

After a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door. — Wallace Stevens

The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies. — Wallace Stevens

A languid janitor bears
His lantern through colonnades
And the architecture swoons. — Wallace Stevens

Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn. — Wallace Stevens

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods. — Wallace Stevens

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

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

Freedom is like a man who kills himself
Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife
Grows sharp in blood. — Wallace Stevens

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

True villains are extremely photogenic. — Wallace Stevens

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

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence. — Wallace Stevens

The mind can never be satisfied. — Wallace Stevens

The stars are putting on their glittering belts,
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow's last embellishment — Wallace Stevens

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. — Wallace Stevens

After a lustre of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn. — Wallace Stevens

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

Man is an eternal sophomore. — Wallace Stevens

The thinker as reader reads what has been written.
He wears the words he reads to look upon
Within his being ... — Wallace Stevens

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. — John Updike

What is there in life except one's ideas,
Good air, good friend, what is there in life? — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

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

I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction. — Wallace Stevens

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

The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. — Wallace Stevens

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation. — Wallace Stevens

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

I am what is around me. — Wallace Stevens

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

The figures of the past go cloaked.
They walk in mist and rain and snow
And go, go slowly, but they go. — Wallace Stevens

After the final no there comes a yes. — Wallace Stevens

Unless we believe in the hero, what is there
To believe? Incisive what, the fellow
Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud ... — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

Imagination is the will of things ... — Wallace Stevens

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

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

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs". — Keith Carter

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

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

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance. — Wallace Stevens

All history is modern history. — Wallace Stevens

After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends. — Wallace Stevens

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible. — Wallace Stevens

It was a page he had Found in the handbook Of heartbreak. Wallace Stevens, "Madame la Fleurie," Collected Poems I — Cornelia Funke

Who, then, are they, seated here?
Is the table a mirror in which they sit and look?
Are they men eating reflections of themselves? — Wallace Stevens