Wallace Stevens Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, The body, it touches. The captain and his menAre one and the sailor and the sea are one.
-
The first idea is an imagined thing.
-
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
-
The world is a force not a presence.
-
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.
-
That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way.The world is ugly, And the people are sad..
-
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
-
Man is an eternal sophomore.
-
The President ordains the bee to be Immortal. The President ordains.
-
A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned - A cymbal crashed, Amid roaring horns.
-
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams Of inaccessible Utopia. A mountainous music always seemed To be falling and to be passing away.
-
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. Yet the General was rubbish in the end.
-
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
-
A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.
-
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.
-
The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.
-
The point of vision and desire are the same.
-
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general
-
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.
-
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.