Quotes from Wallace Stevens

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

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.

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

We keep coming back and coming backTo the real: to the hotel instead of the hymnsThat fall upon it out of the wind.

One's grand flights, one's Sunday baths,One's tootings at the weddings of the soulOccur as they occur.

LightIs the lion that comes down to drink.

The humble are they that move about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts.

She says, "But in contentment I still feelThe need of some imperishable bliss."Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreamsAnd our desires.

The natives of the rain are rainy men.

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

The inconceivable idea of the sun.You must become an ignorant man againAnd see the sun again with an ignorant eyeAnd see it clearly in the idea of it.

Thus the theory of description matters most.It is the theory of the word for thoseFor whom the word is the making of the world,The buzzing world and lisping firmament.It is a world of words to the end of it,In which nothing solid is its solid self.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

The President ordains the bee to beImmortal.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,Drunk and asleep in his boots,Catches tigersIn red weather.

It was the last nostalgia: that heShould understand.

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftanOf tan with henna hackles, halt!

It is the celestial ennui of apartmentsThat sends us back to the first idea.

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.

The plum survives its poems.

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

He is like a manIn the body of a violent beast.Its muscles are his own…The lion sleeps in the sun.Its nose is on its paws.It can kill a man.