388 Quotes by Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.

Beauty is momentary in the mind / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal. / The body dies; the body's beauty lives.

The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.

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...

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

The genuine artist is never ''true to life'.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.