Wallace Stevens Quotes

I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

We pop into existence and we know that we die and we know that we lose everyone that we love and we know we even lose our own bodies. And what a paradigm. What a mystery.

Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored

Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.

A simple child. That lightly draws its breath. And feels its life in every limb. What should it know of death?

Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs.

What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief Death took him.

Our children that die young are like those spring bulbs which have their flowers prepared beforehand, and leave nothing to do but to break ground, and blossom, and pass away. Thank God for spring flowers among men, as well as among the grasses of the field.

By Fate full many a heart has been undone, And many a sprightly rose made woe-begone; Plume thee not on thy lusty youth and strength: Full many a bud is blasted ere its bloom.

The on­ly thing I know is ev­ery­thing you love will die.

There is nothing certain in a man's life but that he must lose it.

Birth was the death of him.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

Death is a distant rumor to the young.

I've been through so much in my life. I've seen so much. I know how fast things can change. I know someone can be here one minute and gone the next.

Life is an incurable disease.

Alas, how quickly the gratitude owed to the dead flows off, how quick to be proved a deceiver.

It was despairing to find out that I am mortal.

I realise how precious life is, probably because I've seen how it can be taken away.

As soon as the dirt is hitting the casket, it'll all be forgotten.

When we look at the flowers, we suddenly forget so many important things. We forget that all flowers die. We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing season, we'll join them in the cold ground.

The moment you're born you're done for.

Our birth is nothing but our death begun, As tapers waste the moment they take fire.