Wallace Stevens
Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.Collection: Mirrors
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.Collection: Real
Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.Collection: Fall
Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.Collection: Dream
God is gracious to some very peculiar people.Collection: People
Words of the world are the life of the world.Collection: World
A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.Collection: Eye
It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.Collection: Reality
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Eye
Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.Collection: Ethics
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.Collection: Blue
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.Collection: Photography
It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.Collection: Ice
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.Collection: Time
Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.Collection: Results
Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Games
The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.Collection: Belief
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.Collection: Whales
Life is not free from its forms.Collection: Life Is
People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.Collection: Children
Thought tends to collect in pools.Collection: Pool
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.Collection: Perception
Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.Collection: Keys