Wallace Stevens Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• 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

  10 Copy quote

• The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

  Wallace Stevens

  Cities, Want, Letting You Go

  4 Copy quote

• The sea
  Severs not only lands but also selves.

  Wallace Stevens

  Self, Sea, Land

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.30, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.

  Wallace Stevens

  Mind, Poet

  1957 Opus Posthumous, Aphorisms,'Adagia'.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

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

  Wallace Stevens

  Beauty, Mother, Dream

  Wallace Stevens (2002). “Harmonium”, p.107, Icaria Editorial

  8 Copy quote

• Poetry is the scholar's art.

  Wallace Stevens

  Art, Scholar, Poetry Is

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Rain, Fall, Winter

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.179, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  18 Copy quote

• We live in an old chaos of the sun.

  Wallace Stevens

  Sun, Chaos

  'Sunday Morning, I' (1923)

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  86 Copy quote

• We say
  This changes and that changes. Thus the constant
  Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
  Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
  In a universe of inconstancy.

  Wallace Stevens

  Change, Girl, Violet

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.285, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Wallace Stevens

  Needs, Rivals, Addresses

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.144, Vintage

  9 Copy quote

• God is in me or else is not at all.

  Wallace Stevens

  Spiritual, Spirituality

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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• 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”

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• The mind can never be satisfied.

  Wallace Stevens

  Mind, Satisfied

  6 Copy quote

• 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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