388 Quotes by Wallace Stevens

It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

How cold the vacancy When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist First sees reality. The mortal no Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.

The mind is smaller than the eye.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Day after day, throughout the winter, We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason In a world of wind and frost....

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice....

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.