Wallace Stevens Quotes - Page 4

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

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

The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.

The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

The sea Severs not only lands but also selves.

Imagination is the will of things. . . .

The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.

If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us; yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.

To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

Make the visible a little hard to see.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.

It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.

Disillusion is the last illusion.