Top 160 Wallace Stevens Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

103. “The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

105. “Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.”

— Wallace Stevens

106. “A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”

— Wallace Stevens

107. “God is gracious to some very peculiar people.”

— Wallace Stevens

108. “It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I’ve lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

110. “The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.”

— Wallace Stevens

111. “The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.”

— Wallace Stevens

112. “Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.”

— Wallace Stevens

113. “The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.”

— Wallace Stevens

114. “Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.”

— Wallace Stevens

115. “Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.”

— Wallace Stevens

116. “Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.”

— Wallace Stevens

117. “Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.”

— Wallace Stevens

118. “To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.”

— Wallace Stevens

119. “Poetry is the scholar’s art.”

— Wallace Stevens

120. “The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.”

— Wallace Stevens

121. “The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.”

— Wallace Stevens

122. “It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.”

— Wallace Stevens

123. “The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.”

— Wallace Stevens

124. “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

125. “People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.”

— Wallace Stevens

126. “Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood. The armies kill themselves, And in their blood an ancient evil dies – The action of incorrigible tragedy.”

— Wallace Stevens

127. “The wound kills that does not bleed.”

— Wallace Stevens

128. “To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

130. “Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.”

— Wallace Stevens

131. “The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.”

— Wallace Stevens

132. “Poetry increases the feeling for reality.”

— Wallace Stevens

133. “I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

135. “Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.”

— Wallace Stevens

136. “We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.”

— Wallace Stevens

137. “Poetry is poetry, and one’s objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one’s objective in music is to achieve music.”

— Wallace Stevens

138. “The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.”

— Wallace Stevens

139. “Next to love is the desire for love.”

— Wallace Stevens

140. “As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.”

— Wallace Stevens

141. “The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.”

— Wallace Stevens

142. “The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.”

— Wallace Stevens

143. “All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.”

— Wallace Stevens

144. “Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.”

— Wallace Stevens

145. “The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.”

— Wallace Stevens

146. “Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring.”

— Wallace Stevens

147. “Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.”

— Wallace Stevens

148. “Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.”

— Wallace Stevens

149. “Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.”

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens