Wallace Stevens Quotes & Sayings

Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.
Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,
As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,
And out of their droning sibilants makes
A serenade. — Wallace Stevens

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind. — Wallace Stevens

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking. — Wallace Stevens

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art. — Wallace Stevens

The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes
Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
Of machine within machine within machine. — Wallace Stevens

Imagination ... is the irrepressible revolutionist. — Wallace Stevens

We say God and the imagination are one ...
How high that highest candle lights the dark. — Wallace Stevens

I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless. — Wallace Stevens

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter. — Wallace Stevens

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods. — Wallace Stevens

Money is a kind of poetry. — Wallace Stevens

The muddy rivers of spring
Are snarling
Under the muddy skies.
The mind is muddy. — Wallace Stevens

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism. — Wallace Stevens

The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book. — Wallace Stevens

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never. — Wallace Stevens

It is never the thing but the version of the thing. — Wallace Stevens

The mind is smaller than the eye. — Wallace Stevens

The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies. — Wallace Stevens

If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,
The future might stop emerging out of the past,
Out of what is full of us; yet the search
And the future emerging out of us seem to be one. — Wallace Stevens

What's down below is in the past
Like last night's crickets, far below. — Wallace Stevens

I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again ... — Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. — Wallace Stevens

Trees Trees, proud standing people stretching fingertips to the sky, reaching, praying glorious attention, breathing light. strength shelter timeless confidence bending and firm comforting rooted chorus line dancing with the moon, the wind, the clouds framing bursts of stars tender rugged celebration absorbing and releasing life each holy branch holding the power of the Universe. There. — Wallace Stevens

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon ... — Wallace Stevens

One must read poetry with one's nerves. — Wallace Stevens

My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called "standing people ... " — Wallace Stevens

Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal. — Wallace Stevens

All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas. — Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it
was upon a hill. — Wallace Stevens

You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing. — Wallace Stevens

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom. — Wallace Stevens

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down. — Wallace Stevens

The truth is that there comes a time
When we can mourn no more over music
That is so much motionless sound — Wallace Stevens

Day after day, throughout the winter,
We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
In a world of wind and frost ... — Wallace Stevens

The law of chaos is the law of ideas,
Of improvisations and seasons of belief.
Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and
The mass of men are one. Chaos is not
The mass of meaning. It is three or four
Ideas, or, say, five men or, possibly, six.
In the end, these philosophic assassins pull
Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains.
The mass of meaning becomes composed again. — Wallace Stevens

Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things. — Wallace Stevens

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal. — Wallace Stevens

I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music. — Wallace Stevens

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination. p. 919 — Wallace Stevens

Imagination is the will of things ... — Wallace Stevens

It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade. — Wallace Stevens

It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings. — Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. — Wallace Stevens

After a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door. — Wallace Stevens

From Secret Man

The man of autumn,
Behind its melancholy mask,
Will laugh in the brown grass,
Will shout from the tower's rim. — Wallace Stevens

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore. — Wallace Stevens

God is gracious to some very peculiar people. — Wallace Stevens

It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea. — Wallace Stevens

Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed. — Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow — Wallace Stevens

Disillusion is the last illusion. — Wallace Stevens

These are the ashes of fiery weather,
Of nights full of the green stars from Ireland,
Wet out of the sea, and luminously wet,
Like beautiful and abandonded refugees. — Wallace Stevens

The physical world is meaningless tonight
And there is no other. — Wallace Stevens

It was soldier's went marching over the rocks,
and still they came in watery flocks,
because it was spring and the birds had to come,
No doubt that soldier's had to be marching,
and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling — Wallace Stevens

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough. — Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs. — Wallace Stevens

Already the new-born children interpret love
In the voices of mothers. — Wallace Stevens

Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic. — Wallace Stevens

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. — Wallace Stevens

I have said no
To everything, in order to get at myself.
I have wiped away moonlight like mud ... — Wallace Stevens

Words of the world are the life of the world. — Wallace Stevens

The figures of the past go cloaked.
They walk in mist and rain and snow
And go, go slowly, but they go. — Wallace Stevens

Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals. — Wallace Stevens

I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction. — Wallace Stevens

A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. — Wallace Stevens

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me. — Wallace Stevens

The sea
Severs not only lands but also selves. — Wallace Stevens

They said, "You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar. — Wallace Stevens

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend? — Wallace Stevens

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it. — Wallace Stevens

After the final no there come a yes, and on that yes a future world depends. — Wallace Stevens

The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair. — Wallace Stevens

A languid janitor bears
His lantern through colonnades
And the architecture swoons. — Wallace Stevens

Youngish artists have a way of being melancholy. It may be that this is merely a symptom of the distress they feel at the absence of definition. They have no very distinct outline either of themselves or of the abstractions that bedevil them. They are, in short, likely to be a bit baffled. — Wallace Stevens

It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. — Wallace Stevens

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to. — Wallace Stevens

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. — Wallace Stevens

Another Weeping Woman
Pour the unhappiness out
From your too bitter heart,
Which grieving will not sweeten.
Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.
The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world
Leaves you
With him for whom no phantasy moves,
And you are pierced by a death. — Wallace Stevens

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier. — Wallace Stevens

The fire burns as the novel taught it how. — Wallace Stevens

The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination. — Wallace Stevens

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying. — Wallace Stevens

The poet is the priest of the invisible. — Wallace Stevens

Bantams in Pine-Woods
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.
Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.
You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,
Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos. — Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. — Wallace Stevens

Life is the elimination of what is dead. — Wallace Stevens

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss. — Wallace Stevens

Cold is our element and winter's air
Brings voices as of lions coming down. — Wallace Stevens

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after. — Wallace Stevens

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On on another, as Logos depends
On Eros, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.
Music falls on the silence like a sense
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together
And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away together as one in the greenest body. — Wallace Stevens

It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives. — Wallace Stevens

In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination. — Wallace Stevens

The imperfect is our paradise. — Wallace Stevens

I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door. — Wallace Stevens

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us. — Wallace Stevens

A pear should come to the table popped with juice,
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist. — Wallace Stevens

The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, the body, it touches. — Wallace Stevens

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time. — Wallace Stevens