Wallace Stevens Quotes

368 Sourced Quotes

If the hero is not a person, the emblem
Of him, even if Xenophon, seems
To stand taller than a person stands, has
A wider brow, large and less human
Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body
Of a primitive.

Wallace Stevens
The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die
The broken cartwheel on the hill.

Wallace Stevens
On a few words of what is real in the world
I nourish myself. I defend myself against
Whatever remains.

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 physical world is meaningless tonight
And there is no other.

Wallace Stevens
The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.

Wallace Stevens
The thinker as reader reads what has been written.
He wears the words he reads to look upon
Within his being....

Wallace Stevens
To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.

Wallace Stevens
Of what is real I say,
Is it the old, the roseate parent or
The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else
The spirit and all ensigns of the self?

Wallace Stevens
Funest philosophers and ponderers,
Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

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

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.

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

Wallace Stevens
What is one man among so many men?
What are so many men in such a world?
Can one man think one thing and think it long?
Can one man be one thing and be it long?

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

Wallace Stevens
The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world...

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

Wallace Stevens
It may be that the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate his life with life
That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.

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

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

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

Wallace Stevens
There's no such thing as life; or if there is,
It is faster than the weather, faster than
Any character. It is more than any scene:
Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.

Wallace Stevens
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.

Wallace Stevens
The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.

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

Wallace Stevens
One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls,
When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops.
He mocks the guinea, challenges
The crow, inciting various modes.
The sparrow requites one, without intent.

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

Wallace Stevens
The winter is made and you have to bear it,
The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,
For all the thoughts of summer that go with it
In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags....

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

Wallace Stevens