Wallace Stevens Quotes

True villains are extremely photogenic.

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 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.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

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

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

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

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

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.

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

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.

At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

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

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

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

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

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

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.

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

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

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

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

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

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

Disillusion is the last illusion.

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

God and the imagination are one.

I was the world in which I walked.

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.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.

The imperfect is our paradise.

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

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

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

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.

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

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

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

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