Quote

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

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
Real
Extraordinary
Intensifies
Effects
Adhere
Loses
Ceases
Imagination
Unreal
May
Vitality
Ever
Maximum
Firsts
Cease
First
Effect
Adheres

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
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The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
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The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.
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Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
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Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
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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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I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.
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It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
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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.
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Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.
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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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Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
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The word is the making of the world
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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.
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It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
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All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.
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Disillusion is the last illusion.
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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
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For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
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