Wallace Stevens

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

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

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

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.

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

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.

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

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.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Money is a kind of poetry.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

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.

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

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

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