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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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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Made
Realities
Consists
Reality
Many

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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
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One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent.
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The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
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Cold is our element and winter's air Brings voices as of lions coming down.
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It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
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The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.
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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
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Make the visible a little hard to see.
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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.
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If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
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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.
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New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
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The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
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The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
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All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.
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The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
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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.
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It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
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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