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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

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
Desolate
Except
Within
Would
World

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You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.
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We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.
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An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.
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Make the visible a little hard to see.
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in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
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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.
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God and the imagination are one.
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Life is not free from its forms.
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Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
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It is the belief and not the god that counts.
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
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Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
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Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
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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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To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game the ideal is to suggest.
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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.
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You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.
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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
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Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
Wallace Stevens