388 Quotes by Wallace Stevens

I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.

The word is the making of the world

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.

She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need for imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?