Quotes by Wallace Stevens
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
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.
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
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.
One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.
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.
The genuine artist is never "true to life." He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
The imagination is man's power over nature.
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.
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends...
We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant...
with our bones We left much more, left what still is The look of things, left what we felt At what we saw.
Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead And his finical carriers tread,...
