Quotes by Wallace Stevens
For the soldier of time, it breathes a summer sleep, ...
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.
There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than...
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure.
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.
