Skip to content

Quotes from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction — Wallace Stevens

1879–1955 United States

← All quotes by Wallace Stevens

79 quotes

Each must the other take as sign, short sign
To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect
The final elegance, not to console
Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

It is the celestial ennui of apartments
That sends us back to the first idea.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

He tries by a peculiar speech to speak
The peculiar potency of the general.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse
Suggested that, at the final funeral,
The music halted and the horse stood still.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets
Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves
Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

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.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

It was enough for her that she remembered.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament,
This is a facile exercise.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

He imposes orders as he thinks of them,
As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

The President has apples on the table
And barefoot servants round him, who adjust
The curtains to a metaphysical "t".

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look
Across the roofs as sigil and as ward
And in your centre mark them and are cowed.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

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.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

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

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

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.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

An unaffected man in a negative light
Could not have borne his labor nor have died
Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Wallace Stevens (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.