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Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
Wallace Stevens -
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.
Wallace Stevens
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Slowly the ivy on the stones Becomes the stones. Women become The cities, children become the fields And men in waves become the sea.
Wallace Stevens -
Red-in-red repetitions never going Away,a little rusty, a little rouged, A little roughened and ruder, a crownThe eye could not escape, a red renown Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.
Wallace Stevens -
I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
Wallace Stevens -
Exile desire For what is not. This is the barrenness Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.
Wallace Stevens -
Should there be a question of returning or Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this Booming and booming of the new-come bee.
Wallace Stevens -
One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Wallace Stevens
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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens -
If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
Wallace Stevens -
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything.
Wallace Stevens -
It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.
Wallace Stevens -
First one beam, then another, then A thousand are radiant in the sky. Each is both star and orb; and day Is the riches of their atmosphere.
Wallace Stevens -
If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
Wallace Stevens
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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens -
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
Wallace Stevens -
After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
Wallace Stevens -
Money is a kind of poetry.
Wallace Stevens -
The President has apples on the table And barefoot servants round him, who adjust The curtains to a metaphysical 't'
Wallace Stevens -
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Wallace Stevens
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What is beyond the cathedral, outside, Balances with nuptial song. So it is to sit and to balance things To and to and to the point of still, To say of one mask it is like, To say of another it is like, To know that the balance does not quite rest, That the mask is strange, however like.
Wallace Stevens -
The words they spoke were voices that she heard. She looked at them and saw them as they were And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.
Wallace Stevens -
I placed a jar in Tennessee And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose upon it, And sprawled around, no longer wild.
Wallace Stevens -
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Wallace Stevens