Quotes from Wallace Stevens

A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need for imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?

One must have a mind of winter.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.

Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak. / I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill. / Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.

There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

Thought tends to collect in pools.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor's trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things

If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts it becomes an epidemic. p901

There will never be an end To this droning of the surf.

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still the sky was blue.

We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.

They said"You have a blue guitar You do not play things as they are". The man replied,"things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar".