Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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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Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
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Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come.
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The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher Appoints man’s place in music, say, today. But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle.
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
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I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
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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.
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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.
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Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
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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.
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Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything.
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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.
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The President has apples on the table And barefoot servants round him, who adjust The curtains to a metaphysical 't'
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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
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My house has changed a little in the sun. The fragrance of the magnolias come close, False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.
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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.
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After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
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Money is a kind of poetry.