Wallace Stevens - Life Quotes

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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Wallace Stevens
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Wallace Stevens
Above the forest of the parakeets,
A parakeet of parakeets prevails,
A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

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
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
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

Wallace Stevens
Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.

Wallace Stevens
The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.

Wallace Stevens
The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man. Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away. The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away. Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away. That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.

Wallace Stevens
What makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.

Wallace Stevens
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Wallace Stevens
In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American — on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.

Wallace Stevens
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.

Wallace Stevens
The subject matter of poetry is not that "collection of solid, static objects extended in space" but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.

Wallace Stevens
I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.

Wallace Stevens
What is there in life except one's ideas.
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe?

Wallace Stevens
The number of ways of passing between the traditional two fixed points of man's life, that is to say, of passing from the self to God, is fixed only by the limitations of space, which is limitless. The eternal philosopher is the eternal pilgrim on that road. It is difficult to take him seriously when he relies on the evidence of the teeth, the throat and the bowels. Yet in the one poem that is unimpeachably divine, the poem of the ascent into heaven, it is possible to say that there can be no faults, since it is precisely the faults of life this poem enables us to leave behind. If the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea, then the idea of the ascent into heaven is only a little below it.

Wallace Stevens
So that's life, then: things are they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?
And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

Wallace Stevens
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

Wallace Stevens
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

Wallace Stevens
Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

Wallace Stevens