Quote

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.'

Wallace Stevens

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Things
Men
Replied
Guitar
Blue
Changed
Upon
Play

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

Image
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.
Wallace Stevens
Image
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Day after day, throughout the winter, We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason In a world of wind and frost.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.
Wallace Stevens
Image
I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Of what is real I say, Is it the old, the roseate parent or The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
Wallace Stevens
Image
The imperfect is our paradise.
Wallace Stevens
Image
I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.
Wallace Stevens
Image
What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long?
Wallace Stevens
Image
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
Image
I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
Wallace Stevens
Image
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Wallace Stevens