Wallace Stevens quotes

The imagination is one of the forces of nature. (Wallace Stevens)
Perhaps The truth depends on a walk around a lake.
Wallace Stevens
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
Wallace Stevens
The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.
Wallace Stevens
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Wallace Stevens
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.
Wallace Stevens
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.
Wallace Stevens
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Wallace Stevens
The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it. (Wallace Stevens)
Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
Wallace Stevens
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
Wallace Stevens
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Wallace Stevens
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.
Wallace Stevens
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Wallace Stevens
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
Wallace Stevens
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
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
Wallace Stevens
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Wallace Stevens
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. (Wallace Stevens)
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
Wallace Stevens
The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
Wallace Stevens
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
It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedarlimbs.
Wallace Stevens