Wallace Stevens Quotes
-
Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.
-
Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
-
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.
-
Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.
-
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.
-
I play. But this is what I think.
-
To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
-
What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe?
-
I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks
-
The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
-
Be content - Expansions, diffusions - content to be The unspotted imbecile revery, The heraldic center of the world Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins, The amorist Adjective aflame...
-
Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.
-
The casual is not Enough. The freshness of transformation isThe freshness of a world. It is our own, It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves, And that necessity and that presentationAre rubbings of a glass in which we peer.
-
It was enough for her that she remembered.
-
Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.
-
He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,Or power of the wave, or deepened speech, Or a leaner being, moving in on him, Of greater aptitude and apprehension,As if the waves at last were never broken, As if the language suddenly, with ease, Said things it had laboriously spoken.
-
These Are the music of meet resignation; these The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you To magnify, if in that drifting waste You are to be accompanied by more Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.
-
We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
-
Eye without lid, mind without any dream -These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy, Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a birdOf stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you And you, bethou him and bethou. It is A sound like any other. It will end.
-
Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.
-
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
-
Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting.
-
The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew.
-
Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.