Wallace Stevens - Night Quotes

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Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

Wallace Stevens
The night
Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
Night is the nature of man's interior world?

Wallace Stevens
What's down below is in the past
Like last night's crickets, far below.

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

Wallace Stevens
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.

Wallace Stevens
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Wallace Stevens
Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.

Wallace Stevens
My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.

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
A candle is enough to light the world.
It makes it clear. Even at noon
It glistens in essential dark.
At night, it lights the fruit and wine,
The book and bread, things as they are...

Wallace Stevens
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows.

Wallace Stevens
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Wallace Stevens
The bees came booming as if they had never gone,
As if hyacinths had never gone. We say
This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a universe of inconstancy. This means Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph
Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

Wallace Stevens
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Wallace Stevens
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point, Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.
Thereon the learning of the man conceived
Once more night's pale illuminations, gold Beneath, far underneath, the surface of
His eye and audible in the mountain of
His ear, the very material of his mind.

Wallace Stevens
Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.

Wallace Stevens
A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned —
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.

Wallace Stevens
Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe An odor evoking nothing, absolute.
We encounter in the dead middle of the night
The purple odor, the abundant bloom.

Wallace Stevens
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

Wallace Stevens