Wallace Stevens Quotes

I think March and fall are natural seasons for me to feel invigorated.

Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

When great leaves fall, the winter is at hand.

Swinging on delicate hinges the autumn leaf almost off the stem.

As fall the light autumnal leaves, one still the other following, till the bough strews all its honors on the earth below.

The falling leaf that tells of autumn's death is, in a subtler sense, a prophecy of spring.

When she sees the leaves fall, they raise no other idea in her mind than that winter is approaching.

Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?

The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.

What if the leaves were to fall a-weeping, and say, "It will be so painful for us to be pulled from our stalks, when autumn comes?" Foolish fear! Summer goes, and autumn succeeds. The glory of death is upon the leaves; and the gentlest breeze that blows takes them softly and silently from the bough, and they float slowly down, like fiery sparks, upon the moss.

For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.

Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place. In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.

I see, when I bend close, how each leaflet of a climbing rose is bordered with frost, the autumn counterpart of the dewdrops of summer dawns. The feathery leaves of yarrow are thick with silver rime and dry thistle heads rise like goblets plated with silver catching the sun.

Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.

The Blossoms and leaves in plenty From the apple tree fall each day; The merry breezes approach them, And with them merrily play.

Kings are falling like leaves this autumn.

Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything.