Wallace stevens quotes

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.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

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.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.

Revolution Is the affair of logical lunatics.

An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.

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

The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

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.'

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

The imperfect is our paradise.

Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.

True villains are extremely photogenic.

The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.

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

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.

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.

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.

Disillusion is the last illusion.

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

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.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

God is in me or else is not at all.

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

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

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.

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

Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.

It is the belief and not the god that counts.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

Next to love is the desire for love.

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

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.

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

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

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

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.

The mind is smaller than the eye.

The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.

Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.

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

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

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.

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

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

We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.

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

Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

The mind can never be satisfied.

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.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

I do not know which to prefer - The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

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

Imagination is the will of things. . . .

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.

We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

Anything is beautiful if you say it is.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

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.

Poetry is a means of redemption.

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

I was the world in which I walked.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.

I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.

If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

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

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

Make the visible a little hard to see.

I am what is around me.

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

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.

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

To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

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

The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice