Wallace Stevens Quotes - Page 11

The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy.

Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.

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.

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

Life is not free from its forms.

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

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

Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.

If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.

One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent.

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

A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.

So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio--remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales--we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.

The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

The thinker as reader reads what has been written. He wears the words he reads to look upon Within his being.

That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.