Wallace Stevens

“In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.”

“The poet is the priest of the invisible.”

“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 willingl...”

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

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

“After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.”

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

“We live in an old chaos of the sun.”

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

“One must read poetry with one's nerves.”

“The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.”

“The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.”

“Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.”

“The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was qu...”

“The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his t...”

“Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”

“Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The way through the world Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.”