Wallace Stevens Quotes

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

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 to be
The scholar to whom his 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 mind can never be satisfied.

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.

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

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.