Wallace Stevens Quotes

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

~ Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

~ Wallace Stevens

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

~ Wallace Stevens

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

~ Wallace Stevens

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

~ Wallace Stevens

The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become.

~ Wallace Stevens

The poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully.

~ Wallace Stevens

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

~ Wallace Stevens

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

~ Wallace Stevens

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

~ Wallace Stevens

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

~ Wallace Stevens

Let be be finale of seem.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

~ Wallace Stevens

A poem is a meteor.

~ Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.

~ Wallace Stevens

The Plot Against The GiantFirst GirlWhen this yokel comes maundering,Whetting his hacker,I shall run before him,Diffusing the civilest odorsOut of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.It will check him.Second GirlI shall run before him,Arching cloths besprinkled with colorsAs small as fish-eggs.The threadsWill abash him.Third GirlOh, la...le pauvre!I shall run before him,With a curious puffing.He will bend his ear then.I shall whisperHeavenly labials in a world of gutturals.It will undo him.

~ Wallace Stevens

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

~ Wallace Stevens

All history is modern history.

~ Wallace Stevens

I know noble accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know.

~ Wallace Stevens

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

~ Wallace Stevens

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

~ Wallace Stevens

It matters, because everything we sayOf the past is description without place, a castOf the imagination, made in sound;And because what we say of the future must portend,Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to beLike rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

~ Wallace Stevens

Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.Use dusky words and dusky images.Darken your speech.Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,Conceiving words,As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,And out of their droning sibilants makesA serenade.

~ Wallace Stevens

He heard her low accord,Half prayer and half ditty,And He felt a subtle quiver,That was not heavenly love,Or pity.This is not writIn any book.

~ Wallace Stevens

The villages slept as the capable man went down,Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road,And, capable, created in his mind,Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones,The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

~ Wallace Stevens

It was soldier's went marching over the rocks,and still they came in watery flocks,because it was spring and the birds had to come,No doubt that soldier's had to be marching,and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling

~ Wallace Stevens

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

~ Wallace Stevens

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

~ Wallace Stevens

If there must be a god in the house, must be,Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang outHis stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

~ Wallace Stevens

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of themoon.It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing hecould be told.It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.

~ Wallace Stevens

There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things

~ Wallace Stevens

Consider the odd morphology of regret.

~ Wallace Stevens

The law of chaos is the law of ideas,Of improvisations and seasons of belief.Ideas are men. The mass of meaning andThe mass of men are one. Chaos is notThe mass of meaning. It is three or fourIdeas, or, say, five men or, possibly, six.In the end, these philosophic assassins pullRevolvers and shoot each other. One remains.The mass of meaning becomes composed again.

~ Wallace Stevens

The death of one god is the death of all.

~ Wallace Stevens

Children picking up our bonesWill never know that these were onceAs quick as foxes on the hill

~ Wallace Stevens

From oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then,Oriole, also, may be realist.

~ Wallace Stevens

We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.

~ Wallace Stevens

Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

~ Wallace Stevens

It is deep January. The sky is hard.The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.It is in this solitude, a syllable,Out of these gawky flitterings,Intones its single emptiness,The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

~ Wallace Stevens

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

~ Wallace Stevens

In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

~ Wallace Stevens