Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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.
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One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.
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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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To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.
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I saw how the night came, Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks. I felt afraid. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
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It was enough for her that she remembered.
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Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized.
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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
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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 thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew.
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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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The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginningAnd sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end.
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A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.
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To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart That is the common, the bravest fundament, This is a facile exercise
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He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general
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Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.
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The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams Of inaccessible Utopia. A mountainous music always seemed To be falling and to be passing away.
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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.
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The wind in which the dead leaves blow. Here I inhale profounder strength And as I am, I speak and move And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guitar.
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That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way.The world is ugly, And the people are sad..
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The world is a force not a presence.
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Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows.
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We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.
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So that's life, then: things are they are? It picks its way on the blue guitar. A million people on one string? And all their manner in the thing, And all their manner, right and wrong, And all their manner, weak and strong? And that's life, then: things as they are, This buzzing of the blue guitar.