Quotes by Wallace Stevens

“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman”

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

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.

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.

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 inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendosThe blackbird whistlingOr 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 ones nerves.

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

The poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

The Poem That Took The Place Of A MountainThere it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactness Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

After the leaves have fallen, we returnTo a plain sense of things. It is as ifWe 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 termsLike these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

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

Poetry is the scholars art.

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