“Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.” ― Wallace Stevens

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

“One must read poetry with one's nerves.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.”
― Wallace Stevens

“In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.”
― Wallace Stevens

“I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.”
― Wallace Stevens

“It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

“I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.”
― Wallace Stevens, Harmonium