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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
Clich
Metaphor
Escape
Reality

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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I was the world in which I walked.
Wallace Stevens
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Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.
Wallace Stevens
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Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Wallace Stevens
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the windy sky Cries out a literate despair.
Wallace Stevens
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Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
Wallace Stevens
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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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The point of vision and desire are the same.
Wallace Stevens
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
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Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
Wallace Stevens
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Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Wallace Stevens
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
Wallace Stevens
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A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.
Wallace Stevens
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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
Wallace Stevens
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Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
Wallace Stevens
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I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
Wallace Stevens
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The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
Wallace Stevens
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It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
Wallace Stevens
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It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
Wallace Stevens
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One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
Wallace Stevens
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God is in me or else is not at all.
Wallace Stevens