"The imagination is one of the forces of nature."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"Disillusion is the last illusion."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"True villains are extremely photogenic."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"It is the belief and not the god that counts."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)