31 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Perception

Wallace Stevens quotes on perception

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.

15. I am the angel of reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.

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?

36. I heard them cry - the peacocks. Was it a cry against the twilight Or against the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, Turning as the flames Turned in the fire, Turning as the tails of the peacocks Turned in the loud fire, Loud as the hemlocks Full of the cry of the peacocks? Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

52. I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

62. The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, 'You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.' The man replied, 'Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.' And they said then, 'But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.'

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.

90. Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. How should you walk in that space and know Nothing of the madness of space, Nothing of its jocular procreations? Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand Between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

92. Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it. Never suppose an inventing mind as source Of this idea nor for that mind compose A voluminous master folded in his fire.

105. Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized.

107. 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.

108. It must be visible or invisible, Invisible or visible or both: A seeing and unseeing in the eye. The weather and the giant of the weather, Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air: An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.

110. As a man and woman meet and love forthwith. Perhaps there are moments of awakening, Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep, As on an elevation, and behold The academies like structures in a mist.

113. He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase, Or power of the wave, or deepened speech, Or a leaner being, moving in on him, Of greater aptitude and apprehension, As if the waves at last were never broken, As if the language suddenly, with ease, Said things it had laboriously spoken.

123. 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.

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

142. A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

150. The difficultest rigor is forthwith, On the image of what we see, to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning, As when the sun comes rising, when the sea Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed. Yet we are shaken by them as if they were. We reason about them with a later reason.

151. The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window Did not desire that feathery argentines Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them

155. We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

159. The words they spoke were voices that she heard. She looked at them and saw them as they were And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.

160. The nothingness was a nakedness, a point, Beyond which fact could not progress as fact. Thereon the learning of the man conceived Once more night's pale illuminations, gold Beneath, far underneath, the surface of His eye and audible in the mountain of His ear, the very material of his mind.

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

167. These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections

171. Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.

172. You remain the more than natural figure. You Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational Distortion, however fragrant, however dear. That's it: the more than rational distortion, The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

181. It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

185. The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives - if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary . . . What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact...

189. The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

194. At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.

197. Let's see the very thing and nothing else. Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the centre that I seek.