"Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Wallace Stevens quotes (page 13 of 14)
274 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are."
Read quote
3 likes
"I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill."
Read quote
3 likes
"On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains."
Read quote
3 likes
"Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"God is gracious to some very peculiar people."
Read quote
3 likes
"Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance."
Read quote
3 likes
"Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music."
Read quote
3 likes
"Man is an eternal sophomore."
Read quote
3 likes
"The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other."
Read quote
3 likes
"The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill."
Read quote
3 likes
"There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes