The Collected Poems
Wallace Stevens
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
“I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”
“The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.”
“The Snow Man" One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
“Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.”
“It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.”
“The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.”
“From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.”
“Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On on another, as Logos depends On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come. Music falls on the silence like a sense A passion that we feel, not understand. Morning and afternoon are clasped together And North and South are an intrinsic couple And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers That walk away together as one in the greenest body.”
“the lion sleeps in the sun. its nose on its paws. it can kill a man.”
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