Quotes from Wallace Stevens

The wound kills that does not bleed.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

The villages slept as the capable man went down, Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive, The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds, As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed, Impatient of the bells and midnight forms, Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road, And, capable, created in his mind, Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones, The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon ...

If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the rooms and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

Aún no habías nacido cuando los árboles eran cristal ni has nacido ahora, en esta vigilia dentro de un sueño.

Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.

Then the sea and heaven rolled as one and from the two came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.

The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, the body, it touches.

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" The houses are haunted By white night-gowns. None are green, Or purple with green rings, Or green with yellow rings, Or yellow with blue rings. None of them are strange, With socks of lace And beaded ceintures. People are not going To dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather.

Let be be finale of seem, the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions. She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering.

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

After the final no there comes a yes. And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon. It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told. It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know. It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.

He heard her low accord, Half prayer and half ditty, And He felt a subtle quiver, That was not heavenly love, Or pity. This is not writ In any book.

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; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.

Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear. Use dusky words and dusky images. Darken your speech. Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking, But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts, Conceiving words, As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence, And out of their droning sibilants makes A serenade.

After the final no there come a yes, and on that yes a future world depends.

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

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.

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.

Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring.