Wallace Stevens - Reality Quotes

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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
It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.

Wallace Stevens
I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.

Wallace Stevens
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.

Wallace Stevens
Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate?

Wallace Stevens
Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.

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
One of the limits of reality
Presents itself in Oley when the hay,
Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.…
Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is…

Wallace Stevens
It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

Wallace Stevens
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 magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world...

Wallace Stevens
How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

Wallace Stevens
Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.

Wallace Stevens