Quotes from Wallace Stevens

The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.

Money is a kind of poetry.

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.

Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.

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

The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?

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

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

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.

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

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

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

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.