Wallace Stevens
True villains are extremely photogenic.Collection: Villain
Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.Collection: Dark
I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.Collection: Crush
It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.Collection: Everyday
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the worldCollection: Inspiration
A change of style is a change of meaning.Collection: Style
Poetry is a means of redemption.Collection: Mean
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.Collection: Style
Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.Collection: People
It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.Collection: Thinking
Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.Collection: Imagination
The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.Collection: Mind
Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.Collection: Art
...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Fall
In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American -- on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.Collection: Hands
Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.Collection: Dwelling
I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.Collection: Noble
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.Collection: Winter
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Clouds
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.Collection: Civilization
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?Collection: Love
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.Collection: Beautiful
It is the belief and not the god that counts.Collection: Belief
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.Collection: Summer
in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.Collection: Imagination
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.Collection: Perception
I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.Collection: Angel
I was the world in which I walked.Collection: Journey
Next to love is the desire for love.Collection: Love Is
It is never the thing but the version of the thing.Collection: Versions
I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.Collection: Needs
Disillusion is the last illusion.Collection: Lasts
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.Collection: Feelings
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.Collection: Religion