Wallace Stevens Quotes on Change

13 quotes

  1. A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned - A cymbal crashed, Amid roaring horns.

  2. After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

  3. Slowly the ivy on the stones Becomes the stones. Women become The cities, children become the fields And men in waves become the sea.

  4. The death of one god is the death of all.

  5. 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.

  6. The bees came booming as if they had never gone, As if hyacinths had never gone. We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy. This means Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

  7. Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. Yet the General was rubbish in the end.

  8. Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imagined On the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come.

  9. The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, The body, it touches. The captain and his men Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.

  10. Eye without lid, mind without any dream - These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy, Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you And you, bethou him and bethou. It is A sound like any other. It will end.

  11. The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar's dark.

  12. Like a page of music, like an upper air, Like a momentary color, in which swans Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences. The west wind was the music, the motion, the force To which the swans curveted, a will to change, A will to make iris frettings on the blank.

  13. The casual is not Enough. The freshness of transformation is The freshness of a world. It is our own, It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves, And that necessity and that presentation Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.

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