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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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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Spirit
Ever
Human
Humans
Contend
Terrific
Survived
Literature

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is not free from its forms.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
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After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
Wallace Stevens
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I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.
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The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
Wallace Stevens
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The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Wallace Stevens
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It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
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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Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
Wallace Stevens
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Words of the world are the life of the world.
Wallace Stevens
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If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
Wallace Stevens
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Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.
Wallace Stevens
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The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.
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 imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
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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The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.
Wallace Stevens
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Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
Wallace Stevens