Wallace Stevens Quotes - Page 3

I am what is around me.

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

The imperfect is our paradise.

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.

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

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.