Wallace Stevens

"The poet is the priest of the invisible."

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

"Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon ..."

"It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable,Out of these gawky flitterings,Intones its single emptiness,The savagest hollow of winter-sound."

"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake."

"A change of style is a change of meaning."

"There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things"

"Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of themoon. It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing hecould be told. It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know. It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak."

"Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking."

"For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

"It was soldier's went marching over the rocks,and still they came in watery flocks,because it was spring and the birds had to come,No doubt that soldier's had to be marching,and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling"

"THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATEIClear water in a brilliant bowl, Pink and white carnations. The light In the room more like a snowy air, Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow At the end of winter when afternoons return. Pink and white carnations - one desires So much more than that. The day itself Is simplified: a bowl of white, Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,With nothing more than the carnations there. IISay even that this complete simplicity Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed The evilly compounded, vital IAnd made it fresh in a world of white,A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,Still one would want more, one would need more,More than a world of white and snowy scents. IIIThere would still remain the never-resting mind,So that one would want to escape, come back To what had been so long composed. The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight,Since the imperfect is so hot in us,Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds."

"The mind can never be satisfied."

"The truth is that there comes a time When we can mourn no more over music That is so much motionless sound"

"I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involved In what I know."

"Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers."

"Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container."

"I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill."

"There will never be an end To this droning of the surf."

"A poem is a meteor."