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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
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
Time
Modernism
Spend
Modern
Cannot
Many
Important
Things
More quotes by Wallace Stevens
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
The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.
Wallace Stevens
Words of the world are the life of the world.
Wallace Stevens
The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy.
Wallace Stevens
The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.
Wallace Stevens
Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
Wallace Stevens
They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
Wallace Stevens
Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
Wallace Stevens
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.
Wallace Stevens
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
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Wallace Stevens
We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.
Wallace Stevens
It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
Wallace Stevens
If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
Wallace Stevens
The winter is made and you have to bear it, The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind, For all the thoughts of summer that go with it In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.
Wallace Stevens
It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.
Wallace Stevens
It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.
Wallace Stevens
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
Of what is real I say, Is it the old, the roseate parent or The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
Wallace Stevens
