Wallace Stevens Quotes

"Poetry Is a Destructive Force"

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own . . .

The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.

A candle is enough to light the world. It makes it clear. Even at noon It glistens in essential dark. At night, it lights the fruit and wine, The book and bread, things as they are...

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.

Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

I play. But this is what I think.

A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse Suggested that, at the final funeral, The music halted and the horse stood still.

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

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

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

Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

They married well because the marriage-place Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell. They were love’s characters come face to face.

You remain the more than natural figure. You Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational<p>Distortion, however fragrant, however dear. That’s it: the more than rational distortion, The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.