Wallace Stevens Quotes - Page 5

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.

Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.

All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.

God is in me or else is not at all.

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

The mind can never be satisfied.

Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.

The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.

She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need for imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?

The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.