Quote #103

Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

More from Wallace Stevens

  1. We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
  2. Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .
  3. The clouds preceded us. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and c…
  4. Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized.
  5. The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes And eve made air the mirror of herself, Of her sons and of her dau…
  6. Without a name and nothing to be desired, If only imagined but imagined well.
  7. Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
  8. My house has changed a little in the sun. The fragrance of the magnolias come close, False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

All Wallace Stevens quotes