Wallace Stevens

The villages slept as the capable man went down,Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road,And, capable, created in his mind,Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones,The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.

He heard her low accord,Half prayer and half ditty,And He felt a subtle quiver,That was not heavenly love,Or pity.This is not writIn any book.

Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.Use dusky words and dusky images.Darken your speech.Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,Conceiving words,As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,And out of their droning sibilants makesA serenade.

It matters, because everything we sayOf the past is description without place, a castOf the imagination, made in sound;And because what we say of the future must portend,Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to beLike rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

The mind can never be satisfied.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

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 accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know.

All history is modern history.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

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.

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

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