Wallace Stevens - Time Quotes

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Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake, A composing as the body tires, a stop
To see hepatica, a stop to watch
A definition growing certain and A wait within that certainty, a rest
In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.
Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence

Wallace Stevens
And as he came he saw that it was spring,
A time abhorrent to the nihilist Or searcher for the fecund minimum.

Wallace Stevens
You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.

Wallace Stevens
It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Wallace Stevens
It is never the thing but the version of the thing:
The fragrance of the woman not her self,
Her self in her manner not the solid block,
The day in its color not perpending time,
Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord,
The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.

Wallace Stevens
There may be always a time of innocence.
There is never a place.

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
Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.

Wallace Stevens
But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather, It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come, Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one, The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.

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
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
To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.

Wallace Stevens
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.

Wallace Stevens
The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnified.
Deeper within the belly's dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock.

Wallace Stevens
There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

Wallace Stevens
Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There's a meditation there, in which there seems To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?

Wallace Stevens
One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

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
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens