Wallace Stevens Quotes

One must have a mind of winter.

Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose The suitable amours. Time will write them down.

"They said, "You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.

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

Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed: The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps, The aureole above the humming house... It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.

These Are the music of meet resignation; these The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you To magnify, if in that drifting waste You are to be accompanied by more Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

The boots of the men clump On the boards of the bridge. The first white wall of the village Rises through fruit-trees. Of what was it I was thinking? So the meaning escapes.

If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing

After the final no there comes a yes. And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

Be content — Expansions, diffusions — content to be The unspotted imbecile revery, The heraldic center of the world Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins, The amorist Adjective aflame...

But to impose is not To discover. To discover an order as of A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather, It is possible, possible, possible. It must Be possible. It must be that in time The real will from its crude compoundings come,<p>Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike, Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real, To be stripped of every fiction except one, The fiction of an absolute — Angel, Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear The luminous melody of proper sound.

Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood And whichever it may be, is it mine?

The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher Appoints man’s place in music, say, today. But the priest desires. The philosopher desires. And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle.