Quote

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.

Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Walking
Fascinating
Stupid
Crowds
Everybody
Foolish
Tireless
Looking
Mirrors
Antagonistic
Interest
Interests
Horribly
Else
Field
Undoubtedly
York
Unreal
Fields
Crowd

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The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.
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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.
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Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
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The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
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A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
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I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.
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The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
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Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
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I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
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I do not know which to prefer - The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.
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The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
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The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
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Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.
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The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
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Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
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