Quotes By Wallace Stevens

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.