Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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.
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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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The world is a force not a presence.
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The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes And eve made air the mirror of herself,Of her sons and of her daughters.
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The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.
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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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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 President ordains the bee to be Immortal. The President ordains.
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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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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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If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
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A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned - A cymbal crashed, Amid roaring horns.
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This is old song That will not declare itself...
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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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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.
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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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He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general
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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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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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Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized.
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Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. Yet the General was rubbish in the end.
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A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.
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The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
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Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.