Wallace Stevens Quotes

With six meats and twelve wines or else without To walk another room...Monsieur and comrade, The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines.

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

I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.

Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village.

As a man and woman meet and love forthwith. Perhaps there are moments of awakening, Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep, As on an elevation, and behold The academies like structures in a mist.

It may be dismissed, on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction: and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free — if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished its purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation. This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps the same is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death.

Slowly the ivy on the stones Becomes the stones. Women become The cities, children become the fields And men in waves become the sea.

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

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling. p.903

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows.