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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.

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
Enables
Perceive
Opposite
Opposites
Chaos
Normal
Imagination
Power
Abnormal

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The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.
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Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
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The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
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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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Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
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If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
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Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
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Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
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Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.
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The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.
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Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
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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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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
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It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
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True villains are extremely photogenic.
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Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
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How red the rose that is the soldier
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I am what is around me.
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The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again.
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Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
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