Quotes by Wallace Stevens
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.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
The point of vision and desire are the same.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
One's ignorance is one's chief asset.
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Money is a kind of poetry.
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
