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The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

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
Poetry
Makes
Silk
Worms
Dresses
Poet

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The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
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We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.
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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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Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.
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Poetry is a means of redemption.
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The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
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The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
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God and the imagination are one.
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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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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.'
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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
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Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
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Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
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Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.
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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
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The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.
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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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Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.
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