Quotes About Perception

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

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.

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.

I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.

The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. 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." And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.

Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

Poets are never lonely even when they pretend to be.

Sombre as fir trees, liquid cats Moved in the grass without a sound. They did not know the grass went round. The cats had cats and the grass turned gray And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way: The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.

Who, then, are they, seated here? Is the table a mirror in which they sit and look? Are they men eating reflections of themselves?

Her green mind made the world around her green.

He thought often of the land from which he came, How that whole country was a melon, pink If seen rightly and yet a possible red.

The morality of the poet's radiant and productive atmosphere is the morality of the right sensation.

You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Dwelling always in an in-between realm, between eras of the imagination, there exists a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one. — Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, October 1, 1997)

To be at the end of fact is not to be at the beginning of the imagination but it is to be at the end of both.

It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow.

The soul, he said, is composed Of the external world. There are men of the East, he said, Who are the East. There are men of a province Who are that province. There are men of a valley Who are that valley.

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.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." ? Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise All you need, To find poetry, Is to look for it with a lantern.

That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

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

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendos The blackbird whistling Or just after.