19 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Identity

Wallace Stevens quotes on identity

14. One might have thought of sight, but who could think Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees? Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound, But the dark italics it could not propound. And out of what sees and hears and out Of what one feels, who could have thought to make So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming With the metaphysical changes that occur, Merely in living as and where we live.

16. I am one of you and being one of you Is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary angel of earth, Since, in my sight, you see the earth again, Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings, Like watery words awash; like meanings said By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not, Myself, only half a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition appareled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turn Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

24. There are men of the East, he said, who are the East. There are men of a province who are that province. There are men of a valley who are that valley.

25. The dress of a woman of Lhassa, in its place is an invisible element of that place made visible.

39. Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village.

69. And the color, the overcast blue Of the air, in which the blue guitar Is a form, described but difficult, And I am merely a shadow hunched Above the arrowy, still string, The maker of a thing yet to be made; The color like a thought that grows Out of a mood, the tragic robe Of the actor, half his gesture, half His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk Sodden with his melancholy words, The weather of his stage, himself.

74. I know that timid breathing. Where Do I begin and end? And where, As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else.

78. Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood And whichever it may be, is it mine?

82. A substitute for all the gods: This self, not that gold self aloft, Alone, one's shadow magnified, Lord of the body, looking down, As now and called most high, The shadow of Chocorua In an immenser heaven, aloft, Alone, lord of the land and lord Of the men that live in the land, high lord. One's self and the mountains of one's land, Without shadows, without magnificence, The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.

84. I play. But this is what I think.

87. I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks

89. What is beyond the cathedral, outside, Balances with nuptial song. So it is to sit and to balance things To and to and to the point of still, To say of one mask it is like, To say of another it is like, To know that the balance does not quite rest, That the mask is strange, however like.

94. Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was A name for something that never could be named. There was a project for the sun and is. There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be.

117. He is and may be but oh! He is, he is, This foundling of the infected past, so bright, So moving in the manner of his hand. Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him No names. Dismiss him from your images. The hot of him is purest in the heart.

119. In being more than an exception, part, Though an heroic part, of the commonal. The major abstraction is the commonal, The inanimate, difficult visage.

132. 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.

140. I am the spouse. She took her necklace off And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt. I am the spouse, divested of bright gold, The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst, Beyond the burning body that I bear. I am the woman stripped more nakedly Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

165. Is it he or is it I that experience this?

166. There is a month, a year, there is a time In which majesty is a mirror of the self: I have not but I am and as I am, I am.