Wallace Stevens
Make the visible a little hard to see.Collection: Littles
God is in me or else is not at all.Collection: Spiritual
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?Collection: Literature
We live in an old chaos of the sun.Collection: Sun
The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.Collection: Reading
She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need for imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?Collection: Death
I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.Collection: Office
The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.Collection: Old Things
The mind can never be satisfied.Collection: Mind
Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.Collection: Children
The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.Collection: Book
I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.Collection: Angel
How red the rose that is the soldierCollection: Rose
The word is the making of the worldCollection: World
The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again.Collection: Summer
Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.Collection: Keys
Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.Collection: Coffee
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Space
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Sweet
For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.Collection: Snow
I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Summer
The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.Collection: Success
The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.Collection: Poetry
Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.Collection: Life
To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.Collection: Literature
An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.Collection: Religious
Imagination is the will of things. . . .Collection: Imagination
The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.Collection: Heaven