Wallace Stevens Quotes

368 Sourced Quotes

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Wallace Stevens
The grackles sing avant the spring
Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly.
They sing right puissantly.

Wallace Stevens
You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.

Wallace Stevens
Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.

Wallace Stevens
This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out
Of dirt... It is not possible for the moon
To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.

Wallace Stevens
The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

Wallace Stevens
Cold is our element and winter's air
Brings voices as of lions coming down.

Wallace Stevens
So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio--remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales--we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.

Wallace Stevens