Quote

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game the ideal is to suggest.

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
Game
Guessing
Name
Suggest
Names
Consists
Pleasure
Poem
Games
Ideal
Three
Object
Littles
Ideals
Fourths
Little
Objects
Deprive

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

Image
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
Wallace Stevens
Image
I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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
Image
If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Wallace Stevens
Image
To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
Wallace Stevens
Image
If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
Wallace Stevens
Image
I do not know which to prefer - The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace Stevens