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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

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
Vitality
Cease
Loses
Imagination
Real
Adhere
Ceases

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It is the belief and not the god that counts.
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
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Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
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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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What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
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It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
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If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
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Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.
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Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
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The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
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Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
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Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
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It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
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Man is an eternal sophomore.
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It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
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Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
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Life is not free from its forms.
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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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The thinker as reader reads what has been written. He wears the words he reads to look upon Within his being.
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I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
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