Wallace Stevens

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

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

How red the rose that is the soldiers wound The wounds of many soldiers the wounds of all The soldiers that have fallen red in blood The soldier of time grown deathless in great size.

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

How red the rose that is the soldier.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

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

The most beautiful in the world is, of course, the world itself.

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

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water feeling with his toes for the bottom The echoes are the bottom.

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.

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

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

Next to love is the desire for love.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

The genuine artist is never "true to life." He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

Money is a kind of poetry.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

God is gracious to some very peculiar people.

The magnificent cause of being, the imagination, the one reality in this imagined world.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

The reason can give nothing at all like the response to desire.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent.

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

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

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.

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