388 Quotes by Wallace Stevens

Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.

God and the imagination are one.

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;

It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

I am what is around me.

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.