Wallace Stevens

"The mind of winter is the mind that accepts things as they are without romantic embellishment."

"We live in descriptions of places, not in the places themselves."

"Poetry is the supreme fiction because it creates value where none existed before."

"The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world, but to live in a world of our own making without awareness of it."

"One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow."

"The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real."

"We are what we imagine ourselves to be."

"The world is ugly, and the people are sad, but we must find beauty in the struggle."

"Life is not about discovering yourself, it is about creating yourself through imagination."

"The final belief is to believe in a fiction which you know to be a fiction."

"Thought is false hemispheres; how shall we reconcile the contradictions of our nature?"

"The poet speaks of the world as if seeing it for the first time."

"Desire as the theme of my song, not love alone, but the hunger for meaning."

"We are forever creating ourselves anew through the language we use."

"The imperfect is our paradise because we are imperfect and must accept our limitations."

"In the end, we are alone with our consciousness and our imagination."

"The pressure of reality is the pressure we place upon ourselves through expectation."

"Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance."

"One cannot just allow the mind to rest in comfort; it must continually remake itself."

"The ordinary made luminous through attention and imagination—this is the work of art."

"We must be content to live in paradox, holding contradictory truths simultaneously."

"The moment of awakening is the moment we see the world without the veil of habit."

"Time does not move; we move through our descriptions of time."

"Freedom is found in accepting necessity rather than rebelling against it."

"The hero is not the one who wins, but the one who persists in the face of meaninglessness."

"Beauty is the byproduct of attention to the world as it truly is."

"We compose our lives as a poet composes a poem, line by line."

"The imagination cannot be less than the life from which it springs."

"In a world without transcendence, we must find meaning in the sensory present."

"The self is not discovered but invented through the stories we tell ourselves."