Wallace Stevens

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

The point of vision and desire are the same.

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

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

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

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

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

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

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.

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

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

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.