Best 259 quotes of Wallace Stevens on MyQuotes

Wallace Stevens

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    Wallace Stevens

    Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

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    Wallace Stevens

    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.

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    Wallace Stevens

    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.

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    Wallace Stevens

    ...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.

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    Wallace Stevens

    After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

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    Wallace Stevens

    After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.

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    Wallace Stevens

    After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

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    Wallace Stevens

    A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.

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    Wallace Stevens

    All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.

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    Wallace Stevens

    All poetry is experimental poetry.

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    Wallace Stevens

    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.

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    Wallace Stevens

    And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.

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    Wallace Stevens

    An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.

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    Wallace Stevens

    A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

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    Wallace Stevens

    A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

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    Wallace Stevens

    As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

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    Wallace Stevens

    At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

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    Wallace Stevens

    At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

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    Wallace Stevens

    A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.

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    Wallace Stevens

    behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

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    Wallace Stevens

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

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    Wallace Stevens

    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.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice

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    Wallace Stevens

    Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Day after day, throughout the winter, We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason In a world of wind and frost.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

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    Wallace Stevens

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

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    Wallace Stevens

    Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.

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    Wallace Stevens

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

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    Wallace Stevens

    Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

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    Wallace Stevens

    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.

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    Wallace Stevens

    God and the imagination are one.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.

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    Wallace Stevens

    God is gracious to some very peculiar people.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.

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    Wallace Stevens

    Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

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    Wallace Stevens

    God is in me or else is not at all.

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    Wallace Stevens

    How cold the vacancy When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist First sees reality. The mortal no Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

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    Wallace Stevens

    How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

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    Wallace Stevens

    How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

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    Wallace Stevens

    I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.

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    Wallace Stevens

    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. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.