Wallace Stevens Quotes

368 Sourced Quotes

That scrawny cry — It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Wallace Stevens
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed
To be falling and to be passing away.

Wallace Stevens
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises…
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm.

Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Wallace Stevens
It is the celestial ennui of apartments That sends us back to the first idea.

Wallace Stevens
Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

Wallace Stevens
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,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

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

Wallace Stevens
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.

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

Wallace Stevens
Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,
How is it I find you in difference, see you there
In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.

Wallace Stevens
New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

Wallace Stevens
Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word, Beau linguist.

Wallace Stevens
What chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most miserable, most victorious, Does not see these separate figures one by one,
And yet see only one, in his old coat,
His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town, Looking for what was, where it used to be?

Wallace Stevens
A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good,
The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

Wallace Stevens
A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell And bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.

Wallace Stevens
A few things for themselves,
Florida, venereal soil,
Disclose to the lover.

Wallace Stevens
Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

Wallace Stevens
Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?

Wallace Stevens
The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

Wallace Stevens
As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.

Wallace Stevens
The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets
Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves
Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

Wallace Stevens
Success as a result of industry is a peasant ideal.

Wallace Stevens
These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections, the escapades of death, Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof.

Wallace Stevens
The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.

Wallace Stevens
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.

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

Wallace Stevens
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.

Wallace Stevens
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it. Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

Wallace Stevens