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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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Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
Wallace Stevens
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Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace Stevens
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The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
Wallace Stevens
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Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.
Wallace Stevens
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Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
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To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
Wallace Stevens
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At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Wallace Stevens
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What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long?
Wallace Stevens
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The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.
Wallace Stevens
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Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
Wallace Stevens
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We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.
Wallace Stevens
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The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
Wallace Stevens
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Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.
Wallace Stevens
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The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
Wallace Stevens
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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
Wallace Stevens
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Disillusion is the last illusion.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens