Wallace Stevens Quotes

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

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.

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

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

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

The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, If one may say so.

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.

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests—undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else—a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?