Wallace Stevens Quotes

It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. This gloom is the darkness of the sea.

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.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

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

Reality is the beginning not the end, Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega, Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody.

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf. This arrival in the wild country of the soul, All approaches gone, being completely there, Where the wild poem is a substitute For the woman one loves or ought to love, One wild rhapsody a fake for another.<p>You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra Hums and you say "The world in a verse,<p>A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains, Women invisible in music and motion and color," After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.

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.

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.

Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,
And out of their droning sibilants makes
A serenade.

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything.

Without a name and nothing to be desired, If only imagined but imagined well.

So poisonous Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes The hermit in a poet’s metaphors, Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.