Wallace Stevens Life Quotations

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.

The genuine artist is never ''true to life'.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.

The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.

There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.

It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.