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in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

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
Actuality
Presence
Extraordinary
Consciousness
Takes
Imagination
Place

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
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The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
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Make the visible a little hard to see.
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We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.
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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 fire burns as the novel taught it how.
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My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called standing people. . . .
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Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
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To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game the ideal is to suggest.
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We live in an old chaos of the sun.
Wallace Stevens
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The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
Wallace Stevens
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Thought tends to collect in pools.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
Wallace Stevens
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All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
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The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.
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Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Wallace Stevens
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Wallace Stevens