Quote

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

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
Feel
Feels
Falls
Like
Silence
Passion
Understand
Fall
Sense
Music

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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
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The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
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It is the belief and not the god that counts.
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All poetry is experimental poetry.
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A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.
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It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.
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The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.
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Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.
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How cold the vacancy When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist First sees reality. The mortal no Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.
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After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
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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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Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
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A violent order is disorder and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
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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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The winter is made and you have to bear it, The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind, For all the thoughts of summer that go with it In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.
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New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
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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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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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Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens