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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

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
Reality
Clich
Metaphor
Escape

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Wallace Stevens
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...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
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Next to love is the desire for love.
Wallace Stevens
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
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At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
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Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
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I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.
Wallace Stevens
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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens
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Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
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Words of the world are the life of the world.
Wallace Stevens
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If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.
Wallace Stevens
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Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.
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.
Wallace Stevens
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The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.
Wallace Stevens
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Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
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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The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.
Wallace Stevens