Wallace Stevens Quotes

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

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.

He imposes orders as he thinks of them, As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.

I am what is around me.

My candle burned alone in an immense valley. Beams of the huge night converged upon it, Until the wind blew. Then beams of the huge night Converged upon its image, Until the wind blew.

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

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts it becomes an epidemic. p901

A substitute for all the gods: This self, not that gold self aloft, Alone, one's shadow magnified, Lord of the body, looking down, As now and called most high, The shadow of Chocorua In an immenser heaven, aloft, Alone, lord of the land and lord Of the men that live in the land, high lord. One's self and the mountains of one's land, Without shadows, without magnificence, The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

There is a month, a year, there is a time In which majesty is a mirror of the self: I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

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.

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

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it
was upon a hill.

What is beyond the cathedral, outside, Balances with nuptial song. So it is to sit and to balance things To and to and to the point of still, To say of one mask it is like, To say of another it is like, To know that the balance does not quite rest, That the mask is strange, however like.