Wallace Stevens Quotes
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They married well because the marriage-place Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell. They were love’s characters come face to face.
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The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
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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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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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God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).
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Place honey on the altars and die, You lovers that are bitter at heart.
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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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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
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An unaffected man in a negative light Could not have borne his labor nor have died Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.
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Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns, Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous, Eliciting the still sustaining pomps Of speech which are like music so profound They seem an exaltation without sound.
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For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and . . . he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief … The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.'
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A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.
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Death is the mother of beauty
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Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.
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I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
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Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .
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I play. But this is what I think.
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Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
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What is divinity if it can comeOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?
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The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse Suggested that, at the final funeral, The music halted and the horse stood still.
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It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
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Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away? Is the poem both peculiar and general? There’s a meditation there, in which there seemsTo be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or Not apprehended well. Does the poet Evade us, as in a senseless element?
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O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?
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What chieftain, walking by himself, crying Most miserable, most victorious,Does not see these separate figures one by one, And yet see only one, in his old coat, His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,Looking for what was, where it used to be?