Opus Posthumous Quotes

“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 willingly.”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“Thought tends to collect in pools.”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“Blanche McCarthy"

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky
And not in this dead glass, which can reflect
Only the surfaces––the bending arm,
The leaning shoulder and the searching eye.

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
Oh, bend against the invisible; and lean
To symbols of descending night; and search
The glare of revelations going by!

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
See how the absent moon waits in a glade
Of your dark self, and how the wings of stars,
Upward, from imagined coverts, fly.”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“All history is modern history.”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“From Secret Man

The man of autumn,
Behind its melancholy mask,
Will laugh in the brown grass,
Will shout from the tower’s rim.

”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“Secret Man"

The sounds of rain on the roof
Are like the sound of doves.
It is long since there have been doves
On any house of mine.

It is better for me
In the rushes of autumn wind
To embrace autumn, without turning
To remember summer.

Besides, the world is a tower.
Its winds are blue.
The rain falls at its base,
Summers sink from it.”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise

All you need,
To find poetry,
Is to look for it with a lantern.

”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“From From the Journal of Crispin

There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams
That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs
Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not
The oncoming fantasies of better birth.

”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“All Things Imagined Are of Earth Compact…

All things imagined are of earth compact,
Strange beast and bird, strange creatures all;
Strange minds of men, unwilling slaves to fact:

Struggling with desperate clouds, they still proclaim
The rushing pearl, the whirling black,
Clearly, in well-remembered word and name.

Even the dead, when they return, return
Not as those dead, concealed away;
But their old persons move again, and burn.

”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose