Wallace Stevens

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.

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

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

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

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

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

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

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

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

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.

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

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

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.

It was evening all afternoon._x000D_ _x000D_ It was snowing_x000D_ _x000D_ And it was going to snow._x000D_ _x000D_ The blackbird sat_x000D_ _x000D_ In the cedar-limbs.