Wallace Stevens Quotes - Page 5

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• I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.

  Wallace Stevens

  Angel, Sight, Knowing

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.437, Vintage

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• Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

  Wallace Stevens

  Flower, Rain, Dust

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.252, Vintage

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• Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.

  Wallace Stevens

  Keys, Self, Sound

  'Peter Quince at the Clavier' (1923) pt. 1

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• 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.

  Wallace Stevens

  Life, Thinking, Imagination

  Wallace Stevens (1997). “Collected Poetry and Prose”

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• The figures of the past go cloaked.
  They walk in mist and rain and snow
  And go, go slowly, but they go.

  Wallace Stevens

  Rain, Past, Snow

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.302, Vintage

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

  Wallace Stevens

  Beauty, Art, Would Be

  Wallace Stevens, Holly Stevens (1966). “Letters of Wallace Stevens”, p.303, Univ of California Press

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• It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.

  Wallace Stevens

  Religion, Gardening, Spirit

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.183, Vintage

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• All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

  Wallace Stevens

  Political, Poetic, Economic

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.17, Vintage

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

  Wallace Stevens

  Philosophy, Science, Philosopher

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.248, Vintage

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• The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

  Wallace Stevens

  Real, Imagination, Vitality

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.6, Vintage

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• Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

  Wallace Stevens

  Mirrors, Crowds, Foolish

  Wallace Stevens, Holly Stevens (1966). “Letters of Wallace Stevens”, p.38, Univ of California Press

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• Poetry is a finikin thing of air
  That lives uncertainly and not for long
  Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

  Wallace Stevens

  Air, Long, Poetry

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.155, Vintage

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• God is in me or else is not at all.

  Wallace Stevens

  Spiritual, Spirituality

  "Opus Posthumous". Book by Wallace Stevens, 1955.

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• The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes
  Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
  Of machine within machine within machine.

  Wallace Stevens

  Nature, Years, Machines

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.157, Vintage

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• How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

  Wallace Stevens

  Literature, Spirit, Humans

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.249, Vintage

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• We live in an old chaos of the sun.

  Wallace Stevens

  Sun, Chaos

  'Sunday Morning, I' (1923)

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• The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

  Wallace Stevens

  Believe, Finals, Fiction

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.244, Vintage

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• The point of vision and desire are the same.

  Wallace Stevens

  Vision, Desire

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.413, Vintage

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• The mind can never be satisfied.

  Wallace Stevens

  Mind, Satisfied

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• Freedom is like a man who kills himself
  Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife
  Grows sharp in blood.

  Wallace Stevens

  Suicide, Freedom, Night

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.292, Vintage

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• The wind shifts like this:
  Like a human without illusions,
  Who still feels irrational things within her.

  Wallace Stevens

  Wind, Illusion, Irrational

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.83, Vintage

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• The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha,
  It held the shivering, the shaken limbs,
  Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.

  Wallace Stevens

  Lakes, Wind, Tree

  Wallace Stevens (1954). “Collected poems”

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• She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need for imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?

  Wallace Stevens

  Death, Mother, Dream

  Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

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• 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.

  Wallace Stevens

  God, Fashion, Men

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.351, Vintage

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• Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.

  Wallace Stevens

  Children, Foxes, Hills

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.183, Vintage

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