Wallace Stevens Quotes
-
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
-
My candle burned alone in an immense valley. Beams of the huge night converged upon it, Until the wind blew. Then beams of the huge night Converged upon its image, Until the wind blew.
-
They married well because the marriage-place Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell. They were love’s characters come face to face.
-
I heard them cry - the peacocks. Was it a cry against the twilight Or against the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, Turning as the flames Turned in the fire, Turning as the tails of the peacocks Turned in the loud fire, Loud as the hemlocks Full of the cry of the peacocks? Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
-
Death is the mother of beauty
-
The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse Suggested that, at the final funeral, The music halted and the horse stood still.
-
Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.
-
Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.
-
One of the limits of reality Presents itself in Oley when the hay, Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.… Things stop in that direction and since they stop The direction stops and we accept what is As good. The utmost must be good and is…
-
The sea returns upon the men, The fields entrap the children, brick Is a weed and all the flies are caught, Wingless and withered, but living alive. The discord merely magnified. Deeper within the belly's dark Of time, time grows upon the rock.
-
Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions.
-
A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.
-
Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music.
-
It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
-
What is divinity if it can comeOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?
-
Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose The suitable amours. Time will write them down.
-
It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.
-
Struggling toward impassioned choirs, Crying among the clouds, enraged By gold antagonists in air - I know my lazy, leaden twang Is like the reason in a storm; And yet it brings the storm to bear. I twang it out and leave it there.
-
I play. But this is what I think.
-
A thing final in itself and, therefore, good: One of the vast repetitions final in Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round And round and round, the merely going round, Until merely going round is a final good, The way wine comes at a table in a wood.
-
Music falls on the silence like a sense, A passion that we feel, not understand.
-
I know that timid breathing. Where Do I begin and end? And where, As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else.
-
His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the solider dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.
-
Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.