Wallace Stevens Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

That's what misery is, Nothing to have at heart. It is to have or nothing.<p>It is a thing to have, A lion, an ox in his breast, To feel it breathing there.<p>Corazon, stout dog, Young ox, bow-legged bear, He tastes its blood, not spit.<p>He is like a man In the body of a violent beast. Its muscles are his own...<p>The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man.

Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed: The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps, The aureole above the humming house... It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.

His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. And war for war, each has its gallant kind. <p>How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the solider dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

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.

The meeting of their shadows or that meet In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay. But your war ends. And after it you return

Yet it depends on yours. The two are one. They are a plural, a right and left, a pair, Two parallels that meet if only in

Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun,<p> Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational,<p>Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street, I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.

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.

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?<p> You are familiar yet an aberration.