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Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

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
Life
Possessed
Transformed
Meant
Birth
Growth
Else
Power
Rebirth
Everything
Transform

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
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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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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
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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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Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
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In a world of universal poverty The philosophers alone will be fat Against the autumn winds In an autumn that will be perpetual.
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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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The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
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The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
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The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.
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To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
Wallace Stevens
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I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.
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The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
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There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.
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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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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.
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Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
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Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
Wallace Stevens
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
Wallace Stevens
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Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
Wallace Stevens