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God is in me or else is not at all.

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
Spiritual
Else
Spirituality

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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I am what is around me.
Wallace Stevens
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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Wallace Stevens
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I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
Wallace Stevens
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A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
Wallace Stevens
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It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.
Wallace Stevens
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What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below.
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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Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
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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Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Wallace Stevens
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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens
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To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
Wallace Stevens
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God and the imagination are one.
Wallace Stevens
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
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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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.
Wallace Stevens
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A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.
Wallace Stevens
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I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
Wallace Stevens
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If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
Wallace Stevens
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One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
Wallace Stevens