Quotes from Wallace Stevens

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

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.

Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.

God is in me or else is not at all.

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

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

Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.

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.

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.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Life is the elimination of what is dead.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

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

Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

Life is not free from its forms.

The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.