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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.”

“Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.”

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

“Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.”

“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.”

“The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.”

“Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.”

“How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.”

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

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

“The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.”

“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 willingly.”

“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.”

“Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.”

“We live in an old chaos of the sun.”

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

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

“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 quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above...”

“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 table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction How he had recomposed the pines,...”

“A poem is a meteor.”

“Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.”

“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.”

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

“Poetry is the scholar's art.”

“I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.”

“The Plot Against The Giant First Girl When this yokel comes maundering, Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him, Diffusing the civilest odors Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. It will check him. Second Girl I shall run before him, Arching cloths besprinkled with colors As small as fish-egg...”

“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.”

“Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!”

“Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.”

“If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.”

“Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.”

“New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.”

“It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.”

“To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.”

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

“Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.”

“The fire burns as the novel taught it how.”