Wallace Stevens Quotes
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.
-
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.
-
The President ordains the bee to be Immortal. The President ordains.
-
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
-
This is old song That will not declare itself...
-
The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.
-
That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way.The world is ugly, And the people are sad..
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. Yet the General was rubbish in the end.
-
The point of vision and desire are the same.
-
Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.
-
Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized.
-
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.