Quote

To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

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
Conception
Outside
Live
World
Conceptions
Existing

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

Image
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.
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
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
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
It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
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
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
Wallace Stevens
Image
You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
Image
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
Wallace Stevens
Image
The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.
Wallace Stevens
Image
People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
Wallace Stevens
Image
If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Disillusion is the last illusion.
Wallace Stevens
Image
For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens