Wallace Stevens

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

“Poetry is the scholar's art.”

“A poem is a meteor.”

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

“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 w...”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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...”

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