Wallace Stevens Quotes

To live is - to war with trolls In the holds of the heart and mind

I hear the birds on the summer breeze, I drive fast I am alone in the night Been trying hard not to get into trouble, but I I've got a war in my mind So, I just ride

The mind at war with itself does war with any other mind, and that produces war in the world - all of it.

When I turn the thought around - the thought that war, let's say war in Iraq, should stop - the turnaround is the war in myself should stop.

Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself.

The freedom of poetic license.

Wars and conflicts begin in the mind, then they are expressed in words and then executed through physical action, so personal transformation is intricately connected with the social and political transformation.

Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.

Night comes, world-jewelled, . . . The stars rush forth in myriads as to wage War with the lines of Darkness; and the moon, Pale ghost of Night, comes haunting the cold earth After the sun's red sea-death--quietless.

It took me a long time to figure out what Holly Golightly was all about. One night after midnight I was still trying. I don't drink much, but I was sipping. And it came to me. I wrote [“Moon River”] in half an hour.

... the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon.

We both have war inside us. Sometimes it keeps us alive. Sometimes it threatens to destroy us.

Perhaps, the answer is that my ravaged mind rails against the idea of God, but something deeper in me calls out as if God might answer. 'There are not foxholes,' I guess, and depression is the deepest and deadliest foxhole I've been in. It may be the 'dark night of the soul' that the mystics talk about but in depression it is not so much that one becomes lost in the dark as one becomes the dark.

To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.

A lot of times I have the song inside of me and I have to fight to get it out. I'm a very visual person, so I can see the song but I can't hear it. But I think that if your music becomes a war for it to happen, in the end there's a certain kind of aggression in the music. And I think that's a lot more interesting.

Can I confess something? I tell you this as an artist, I think you'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving on the road at night I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.

[Neurotics are] torn by inner conflicts ... Every neurotic ... is at war with himself.

But perhaps my art is the art of a lunatic, I thought, mere glittering quicksilver, a blue soul breaking in upon my pictures.

Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.

If people want to make war they should make a color war, and paint each others’ cities up in the night in pinks and greens.

... I am At war 'twixt will and will not.

His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield.