Wallace Stevens Quotes - Page 11

Quotes about:

• Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

  Wallace Stevens

  Fall, Passion, Silence

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.287, Vintage

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• Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.

  Wallace Stevens

  Dream, Writing, Fate

  Holly Stevens, Wallace Stevens (1977). “Souvenirs and prophecies: the young Wallace Stevens”, Random House Inc

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• God is gracious to some very peculiar people.

  Wallace Stevens

  People, Peculiar, Gracious

  Wallace Stevens, Holly Stevens (1966). “Letters of Wallace Stevens”, p.505, Univ of California Press

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• Words of the world are the life of the world.

  Wallace Stevens

  World

  Quoted in Brendan Gill A New York Life (1990).

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• 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

  Eye, Men, Light

  Wallace Stevens, Holly Stevens (1966). “Letters of Wallace Stevens”, p.30, Univ of California Press

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• It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

  Wallace Stevens

  Reality, Self, Expression

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.36, Vintage

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• It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.

  Wallace Stevens

  Time, Men, Speech

  1942 Parts of a World,'Of Modern Poetry'.

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• The grackles sing avant the spring
  Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly.
  They sing right puissantly.

  Wallace Stevens

  Spring

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.133, Vintage

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• Soldier, there is a war between the mind
  And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
  For that the poet is always in the sun,
  Patches the moon together in his room
  To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
  Up down. It is a war that never ends.

  Wallace Stevens

  War, Moon, Night

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.302, Vintage

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• I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.

  Wallace Stevens

  Eye, Sea, Tree

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.45, Vintage

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• Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,
  How is it I find you in difference, see you there
  In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?
  You are familiar yet an aberration.

  Wallace Stevens

  Girl, Summer, Moving

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.301, Vintage

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• Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.

  Wallace Stevens

  Ethics, Painting

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• This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out
  Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon
  To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.

  Wallace Stevens

  Moon, World, Dirt

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.119, Vintage

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• What's down below is in the past
  Like last night's crickets, far below.

  Wallace Stevens

  Past, Night, Lasts

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Selected Poems”, p.80, Knopf

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• Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.
  Have liberty not as the air within a grave
  Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,
  In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.

  Wallace Stevens

  Freedom, Hate, Air

  Wallace Stevens (1954). “Collected poems”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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• It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.

  Wallace Stevens

  Blue, Sky, People

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.65, Vintage

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• Of what is real I say,
  Is it the old, the roseate parent or
  The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else
  The spirit and all ensigns of the self?

  Wallace Stevens

  Real, Self, Parent

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.308, Vintage

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• The physical world is meaningless tonight
  And there is no other.

  Wallace Stevens

  Reality, Tonight, World

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

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• Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

  Wallace Stevens

  Photography, Evil, Cameras

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.256, Vintage

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• Cold is our element and winter's air
  Brings voices as of lions coming down.

  Wallace Stevens

  Winter, Air, Voice

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.134, Vintage

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• It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

  Wallace Stevens

  Ice, Sky, January

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.319, Vintage

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• After a lustre of the moon, we say
  We have not the need of any paradise,
  We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

  Wallace Stevens

  Moon, Hymns, Needs

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.290, Vintage

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• One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees, crusted with snow, And have been cold a long time, to behold the junipers, shagged with ice, the spruces, rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land, full of the same wind, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

  Wallace Stevens

  Time, Winter, Thinking

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.89, Vintage

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• Money is a kind of poetry.

  Wallace Stevens

  Poetry, Kind, Making Money

  Quoted in Harper's, Oct 1985.

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