Wallace Stevens Quotes

From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.

There are men of the East, he said, who are the East. There are men of a province who are that province. There are men of a valley who are that valley.

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

A thing final in itself and, therefore, good: One of the vast repetitions final in Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round<p> And round and round, the merely going round, Until merely going round is a final good, The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

Place honey on the altars and die, You lovers that are bitter at heart.

Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.

Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting.

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.

O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?

Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, <p> By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. <p> The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

This is old song That will not declare itself...

Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.