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It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

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
Live
Last
Preservation
Self
Sound
Analysis
Something
Words
Helps
Lives
Pressure
Helping
Expression
Reality
Doubt
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Imagination
Back
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Pressing

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.
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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
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Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.
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Poetry is the scholar's art.
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The imperfect is our paradise.
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Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
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Revolution Is the affair of logical lunatics.
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Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
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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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All poetry is experimental poetry.
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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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A violent order is disorder and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
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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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It was autumn and falling stars Covered the shrivelled forms Crouched in the moonlight.
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Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.
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My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called standing people. . . .
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
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Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
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At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.
Wallace Stevens