Wallace Stevens Quotes
Wallace Stevens Quotes
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
3469I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
2618 The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
2785 After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.
4845 I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
4805 The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
4711 We live in an old chaos of the sun.
2793 One must read poetry with one's nerves.
2050 The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
2134 Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
3224 The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
1212 Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
1610 After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
4914 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.
4765 The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
4182 A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.
These two things are one.
2255 Poetry is the scholar's art.
1362 Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
3148 A poem is a meteor.
1190 There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.
4696 I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it
was upon a hill.
2519 We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
3991 Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
2637 Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
4925 I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
3824 Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
1006 Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
4835 It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
4278 The mind can never be satisfied.
2453 Wallace Stevens At Amazon
