Wallace Stevens Quotes
-
The world is a force not a presence.
-
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.
-
That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way.The world is ugly, And the people are sad..
-
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
-
Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.
-
Man is an eternal sophomore.
-
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.
-
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.
-
That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say.That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way.The world is ugly, And the people are sad.
-
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. Yet the General was rubbish in the end.
-
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams Of inaccessible Utopia. A mountainous music always seemed To be falling and to be passing away.
-
There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain, So many clappers going without bells, That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister, The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke, A single text, granite monotony
-
The President ordains the bee to be Immortal. The President ordains.
-
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.
-
The point of vision and desire are the same.
-
A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.
-
The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.
-
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.
-
A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.
-
The dress of a woman of Lhassa, in its place is an invisible element of that place made visible.
-
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.
-
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general
-
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began.
-
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.