Thinker’s Stew

The Wallace Stevens edition.

Thanks to Greg Daneke, Emeritus Prof. for reminding me of Wallace Stevens. I had been trying to remember his name but the only thing I could come up with was that Ernest Hemingway had once punched a poet.

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

“It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.”
― Wallace Stevens

“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…