Quotes by Wallace Stevens

“The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become.””

“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.””

“We live in an old chaos of the sun.””

“The imperfect is our paradise.””

“The reader became the book; and summer nightWas like the conscious being of the book.””

“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. ””

“I am what is around me.””

“The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much to be The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there.””

“The mind can never be satisfied.””

“For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.””

“I was the world in which I walked, and what I sawOr heard or felt came not but from myself;And there I found myself more truly and more strange.””