Wallace Stevens Quotes

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

A pear should come to the table popped with juice,
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.
These two things are one.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

A poem is a meteor.

There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.