Wallace Stevens Quotes
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What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
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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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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.
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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
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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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The meeting of their shadows or that meet In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay. But your war ends. And after it you return
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At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
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The imagination is man's power over nature.
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Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade, And you, and you, bethou me as you blow, When in my coppice you behold me be.
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A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hellAnd bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said. Children in love with them brought early flowers And scattered them about, no two alike.
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Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
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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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This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon We loved but would no marriage make. Anon The one refused the other one to take, Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.
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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.
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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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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
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Place honey on the altars and die, You lovers that are bitter at heart.
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
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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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A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one.
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Here is the bread of time to come, Here is its actual stone. The bread Will be our bread, the stone will be Our bed and we shall sleep by night. We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay.
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A candle is enough to light the world. It makes it clear. Even at noon It glistens in essential dark. At night, it lights the fruit and wine, The book and bread, things as they are...