388 Quotes by Wallace Stevens

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

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.

Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.