Top 278 Quotes & Sayings by Wallace Stevens - Page 4

At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.

How red the rose that is the soldier

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.

The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.

The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.

One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.

Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.

The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy.

Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.

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

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.

LIGHT FROM WITHIN my friend, cancer got you damn it: you had it beat for seven years at least. how did it come back? Why all that pain. again. and you, such a fighter you fought me over and over with tears and words and promises. you fought for me with honesty and a light so bright it hurts my heart. sweet lorna. at peace now finally no more battles, just light from within a flickering candle in the dark burns with you.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.

The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.

It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.

Life is the elimination of what is dead.

Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

The word is the making of the world

Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.

the windy sky Cries out a literate despair.

Like the Sweetness of Gardenias Mother, you died 15 years ago. pain, a rapier, cut until, finally, there was just peace like the sweetness of gardenias in the crystal vase on your yellow kitchen table. so fragrant. your voice lingers in my ear reminding, scolding, guiding a pleasant mantra of tenderness, magic words that move my palms, your palms. together we are molding, helping, creating. in the mirror I see your eyes, your beautiful brown circles looking back, so radiant. "don't forget me," you whispered the day you died. I won't.

One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees, crusted with snow, And have been cold a long time, to behold the junipers, shagged with ice, the spruces, rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land, full of the same wind, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

Trees Trees, proud standing people stretching fingertips to the sky, reaching, praying glorious attention, breathing light. strength shelter timeless confidence bending and firm comforting rooted chorus line dancing with the moon, the wind, the clouds framing bursts of stars tender rugged celebration absorbing and releasing life each holy branch holding the power of the Universe. There.

It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.

The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.

It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.

I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.

One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent.

Of the Surface of Things 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.

Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.

On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.

What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below.

So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio--remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales--we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.

If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.

Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.

And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.

Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud.

It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

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.

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.

The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.

That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.

Life is not free from its forms.