Wallace Stevens Quotes
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My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.
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He is and may be but oh! He is, he is, This foundling of the infected past, so bright, So moving in the manner of his hand. Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him No names. Dismiss him from your images. The hot of him is purest in the heart.
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Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.
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The clouds preceded us.There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete.From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.
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The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.
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New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
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That scrawny cry - It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality.
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Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood And whichever it may be, is it mine?
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The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
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This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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Exile desire For what is not. This is the barrenness Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.
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The poet is the priest of the invisible.
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The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
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We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
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The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.
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It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
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All history is modern history.
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This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
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The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate And of its nature, the idiom thereof.
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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.