To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing.... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

Letter to his future wife Elsie Moll Kachel (21 March 1907); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 5