Wallace Stevens Quotes
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What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe?
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Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.
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I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks
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The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular, More fecund as principle than particle
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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.
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Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
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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.
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The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,Beyond which fact could not progress as fact. Thereon the learning of the man conceived Once more night’s pale illuminations, goldBeneath, far underneath, the surface of His eye and audible in the mountain of His ear, the very material of his mind.
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They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational,Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street, I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
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It was enough for her that she remembered.
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We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
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Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting.
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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.
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The dress of a woman of Lhassa, in its place is an invisible element of that place made visible.
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Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.
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Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.
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The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew.
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Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.
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Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate?
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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.
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To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.
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Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew. The nothingness was a nakedness, a pointBeyond which thought could not progress as thought. He had to choose. But it was not a choice Between excluding things. It was not a choiceBetween, but of. He chose to include the things That in each other are included, the whole, The complicate, the amassing harmony.
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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.
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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.