Wallace Stevens quotes

" The summer night is like a perfection of thought. " # Perfection

" Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. " # Truth # Perseverance # Death and Dying

" The imagination is man's power over nature. " # Imagination # Power # Nature

" If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism. " # Egotism # Laughter # Sex

" Post-religious man, as Stevens saw him, still had a deep need for the kind of exaltation of the body and spirit which goes under different names in different religions — Christians call it grace, that is, the feeling or knowledge that the workings of God are revealed to the individual, thus lifting him or her up to a state of ecstatic consciousness. ... For the romantics in general such moments of ecstasis in the midst of nature are experienced by the solitary imagination, and the bonds of society are cast away as unimportant. Stevens once said that the romantic is a falsification, and perhaps the reason for the comment was his feeling that such moments of ecstatic relation in the midst of nature had to be given a social and eventually political meaning, rather than remaining in the arena of the spirit. Stevens poetry then offers a pastoral romantic ecstasis that become the occasions for searching out the relations between the individual, his or her community and the natural world. " # Senses # Love # Poetry and Poets

" 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. " # Fiction # Books - Reading # Music

" 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. " # Imagination # Love # Metaphysics

" Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art. " # Intolerance # Religion # Arts and Artists

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

" As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible. " # Literature # Life and Living # Age and Aging