Wallace Stevens Quotes

171 quotes in 1627 categories

• How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
• As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
• 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…
• It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The…
• The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
• One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
• LIGHT FROM WITHIN my friend, cancer got you damn it: you had it beat for seven years at least. how did it come back? Why…
• Like the Sweetness of Gardenias Mother, you died 15 years ago. pain, a rapier, cut until, finally, there was just peace like the sweetness of…
• Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
• We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
• Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
• It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
• After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world depends
• To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is…
• 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…
• Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
• Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.
• Trees Trees, proud standing people stretching fingertips to the sky, reaching, praying glorious attention, breathing light. strength shelter timeless confidence bending and firm comforting rooted…
• My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called "standing people. . . ."
• Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.

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