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Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

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
Flower
Beauty
Death
Mother
Beautiful
Unmoved
Perishable
Artificial
Flowers

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It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
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Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
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It is the belief and not the god that counts.
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Thought tends to collect in pools.
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It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
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The winter is made and you have to bear it, The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind, For all the thoughts of summer that go with it In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.
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It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
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The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go.
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To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
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My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called standing people. . . .
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After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
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I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.
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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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After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.
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It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.
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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
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Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
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Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
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After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
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