Wallace Stevens Quotes

There's something about the expanse of nature that forces you to think clearly.

He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes. p 1320

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

'Swan,' by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.

Never be afraid to sit a while and think.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

Certain things give you another perspective in life.

Rain is good for me. I feel like I achieve clarity actually when it rains. The longer I have to sit and wait, the clearer my game becomes to me.

CONTEMPLATE THE workings of this world, listen to the words of the wise, and take all that is good as your own. With this as your base, open your own door to truth. Do not overlook the truth that is right before you.

Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking.

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

All confessions are Odysseys.

Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.

Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light; every eye, looking on, finds its own.

What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank God for growing up.

I used to ski across the vast white expanses of a quiet and lonely mountaintop. In the stillness and solitude... I pondered the mysteries of the universe, the planet, nature and of man. I'm still pondering.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple.

I like to take walks in the park by myself, where no one can bother me and I can think.

Night is the mother of thoughts.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

I would not want to write something about something I do not think about.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.