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The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

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
Believe
Exquisite
Final
Finals
Fiction
Belief
Else
Truth
Nothing
Willingly

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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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.
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Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.
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The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
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A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
Wallace Stevens
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I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
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A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.
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The word is the making of the world
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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
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Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
Wallace Stevens
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And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.
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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
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The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.
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An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.
Wallace Stevens
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The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
Wallace Stevens
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One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent.
Wallace Stevens
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Words of the world are the life of the world.
Wallace Stevens
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The reader became the book and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
Wallace Stevens
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After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
Wallace Stevens