388 Quotes by Wallace Stevens

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.

In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be ...

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.