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Quotes from The Man With the Blue Guitar — Wallace Stevens

1879–1955 United States

← All quotes by Wallace Stevens

24 quotes

And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

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

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

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

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed
To be falling and to be passing away.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

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."

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

What is there in life except one's ideas.
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe?

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

First one beam, then another, then
A thousand are radiant in the sky.
Each is both star and orb; and day
Is the riches of their atmosphere.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

The blue guitar
And I are one.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

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.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Be content —
Expansions, diffusions — content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,
The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

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?

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

I play. But this is what I think.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnified.
Deeper within the belly's dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

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."

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Attribution

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