Wallace Stevens Quotes - Page 9

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

How red the rose that is the soldier

God is gracious to some very peculiar people.

The word is the making of the world

Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

Of what is real I say, Is it the old, the roseate parent or The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else The spirit and all ensigns of the self?

The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.

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, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

Cold is our element and winter's air Brings voices as of lions coming down.

I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.

Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes.

Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.

Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

Words of the world are the life of the world.

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.

Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.

The winter is made and you have to bear it, The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind, For all the thoughts of summer that go with it In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.