Quotes from Wallace Stevens

There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.

Words of the world are the life of the world.

Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.

The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes.

It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.

The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

The truth is that there comes a time When we can mourn no more over music That is so much motionless sound

Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.

The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.

My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called "standing people. . . ."

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Next to love is the desire for love.

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.