Wallace Stevens quotes - page 5

Let's see the very thing and nothing else. Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the centre that I seek. (Wallace Stevens)
Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good. View quote
Wallace Stevens
A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover. View quote
Wallace Stevens
That scrawny cry - It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality. View quote
Wallace Stevens
We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves. View quote
Wallace Stevens
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing. View quote
Wallace Stevens
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." View quote
Wallace Stevens
A poem should be a part of one's sense of life. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions. View quote
Wallace Stevens
It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. (Wallace Stevens)
The sea returns upon the men, The fields entrap the children, brick Is a weed and all the flies are caught, Wingless and withered, but living alive. The discord merely magnified. Deeper within the belly's dark Of time, time grows upon the rock. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise. View quote
Wallace Stevens
The dress of a woman of Lhassa, in its place is an invisible element of that place made visible. View quote
Wallace Stevens
One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough. View quote
Wallace Stevens
What the poet has in mind... is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives. View quote
Wallace Stevens
The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, The body, it touches. The captain and his men Are one and the sailor and the sea are one. View quote
Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow. View quote
Wallace Stevens
We live in an old chaos of the sun. View quote
Wallace Stevens
An unaffected man in a negative light Could not have borne his labor nor have died Sighing that he should leave the banjo's twang. (Wallace Stevens)
What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? View quote
Wallace Stevens
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. View quote
Wallace Stevens
The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular, More fecund as principle than particle. View quote
Wallace Stevens
The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes And eve made air the mirror of herself, Of her sons and of her daughters. View quote
Wallace Stevens