Quotes by Wallace Stevens

About Wallace Stevens:

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

Wallace Stevens

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

Wallace Stevens

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

Wallace Stevens

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

Wallace Stevens

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

Wallace Stevens

The Plot Against The Giant First Girl When this yokel comes maundering, Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him, Diffusing the civilest odors Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. It will check him. Second Girl I shall run before him, Arching c...

Wallace Stevens

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Wallace Stevens

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

Wallace Stevens

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

Wallace Stevens

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.

Wallace Stevens

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

Wallace Stevens

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.

Wallace Stevens

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.

Wallace Stevens

We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Wallace Stevens

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Wallace Stevens

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;

Wallace Stevens

From oriole to crow, note the decline In music. Crow is realist. But, then, Oriole, also, may be realist.

Wallace Stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leane...

Wallace Stevens

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

Wallace Stevens

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Wallace Stevens

Author Bio

  • NameWallace Stevens
  • DescriptionAmerican poet
  • BornOctober 2, 1879
  • DiedAugust 2, 1955
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Journalist; Writer
  • WorksThe Auroras Of Autumn
  • AwardsBollingen Prize; Pulitzer Prize For Poetry; National Book Award