Quotes from Wallace Stevens

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

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.

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

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.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

God and the imagination are one.

Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

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

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

Next to love is the desire for love.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

A poem is a meteor.

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.