Wallace Stevens's Quotes

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

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.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.