Wallace Stevens Quotes

A poem is a meteor.

There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.

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

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.

All history is modern history.

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

He heard her low accord, Half prayer and half ditty, And He felt a subtle quiver, That was not heavenly love, Or pity.This is not writIn any book.

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things

Consider the odd morphology of regret.

The death of one god is the death of all.

From oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then, Oriole, also, may be realist.

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

Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking fromThe weight of primary noon ...

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

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

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

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.