Quotes from Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

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

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

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendos The blackbird whistling Or just after.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

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

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

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.

The imperfect is our paradise.

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

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

I am what is around me.

The mind can never be satisfied.

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

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.