Wallace Stevens Quotes

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.

Like a page of music, like an upper air, Like a momentary color, in which swans Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences. <p> The west wind was the music, the motion, the force To which the swans curveted, a will to change, A will to make iris frettings on the blank.

Red-in-red repetitions never going Away,a little rusty, a little rouged, A little roughened and ruder, a crown<p>The eye could not escape, a red renown Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.

A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one.

Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

There is no wing like meaning

There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.

A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover.

If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the room and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly. He must be incapable of speaking, closed, As those are: as light, for all its motion, is; As color, even the closest to us, is; As shapes, though they portend us, are. It is the human that is the alien, The human that has no cousin in the moon. It is the human that demands his speech From beasts or from the incommunicable mass. If there must be a god in the house, let him be one That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass Of which we are too distantly a part.

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

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.