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I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.

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
Wiped
Mud
Moonlight
Rejection
Away
Order
Everything
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The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.
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The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
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The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
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There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.
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I am what is around me.
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Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.
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Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
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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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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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Poetry is the scholar's art.
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Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
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I do not know which to prefer - The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.
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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
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A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.
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In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.
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It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.
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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
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Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.
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The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.
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The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.
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