Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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.
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He is and may be but oh! He is, he is, This foundling of the infected past, so bright, So moving in the manner of his hand. Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him No names. Dismiss him from your images. The hot of him is purest in the heart.
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It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
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The imagination is man's power over nature.
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One's ignorance is one's chief asset.
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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.
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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. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral.
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The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.
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Money is a kind of poetry.
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The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
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My house has changed a little in the sun. The fragrance of the magnolias come close, False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.
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At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.
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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.
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Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
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Here is the bread of time to come, Here is its actual stone. The bread Will be our bread, the stone will be Our bed and we shall sleep by night. We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay.
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I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
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If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
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The words they spoke were voices that she heard. She looked at them and saw them as they were And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.
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Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
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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.
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Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come.