Wallace Stevens quotes - page 6

I can Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them, Like men besides, like men in light secluded, Enjoying angels. (Wallace Stevens)
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. View quote
Wallace Stevens
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. View quote
Wallace Stevens
I am what is around me. View quote
Wallace Stevens
in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill. View quote
Wallace Stevens
They married well because the marriage-place Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell. They were love's characters come face to face. View quote
Wallace Stevens
The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse Suggested that, at the final funeral, The music halted and the horse stood still. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction. View quote
Wallace Stevens
A candle is enough to light the world. It makes it clear. Even at noon It glistens in essential dark. At night, it lights the fruit and wine, The book and bread, things as they are... View quote
Wallace Stevens
At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind. (Wallace Stevens)
He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase, Or power of the wave, or deepened speech, Or a leaner being, moving in on him, Of greater aptitude and apprehension, As if the waves at last were never broken, As if the language suddenly, with ease, Said things it had laboriously spoken. View quote
Wallace Stevens
A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite. View quote
Wallace Stevens
There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain, So many clappers going without bells, That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister, The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke, A single text, granite monotony. View quote
Wallace Stevens
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Red-in-red repetitions never going Away, a little rusty, a little rouged, A little roughened and ruder, a crownThe eye could not escape, a red renown Blowing itself upon the tedious ear. View quote
Wallace Stevens
In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody. View quote
Wallace Stevens
This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince. View quote
Wallace Stevens
They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational,Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street, I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo. View quote
Wallace Stevens
The blue guitar And I are one. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them. (Wallace Stevens)
My dame, sing for this person accurate songs. View quote
Wallace Stevens
The number of ways of passing between the traditional two fixed points of man's life, that is to say, of passing from the self to God, is fixed only by the limitations of space, which is limitless. The eternal philosopher is the eternal pilgrim on that road. It is difficult to take him seriously when he relies on the evidence of the teeth, the throat and the bowels. Yet in the one poem that is unimpeachably divine, the poem of the ascent into heaven, it is possible to say that there can be no faults, since it is precisely the faults of life this poem enables us to leave behind. If the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea, then the idea of the ascent into heaven is only a little below it. View quote
Wallace Stevens
The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar's dark. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Place honey on the altars and die, You lovers that are bitter at heart. View quote
Wallace Stevens