Wallace Stevens Quotes
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The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.
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We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.
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Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.
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I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks
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It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
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That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way.The world is ugly, And the people are sad..
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The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular, More fecund as principle than particle
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A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned - A cymbal crashed, Amid roaring horns.
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A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.
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The President ordains the bee to be Immortal. The President ordains.
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Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows.
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The world is a force not a presence.
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To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
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The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,Beyond which fact could not progress as fact. Thereon the learning of the man conceived Once more night’s pale illuminations, goldBeneath, far underneath, the surface of His eye and audible in the mountain of His ear, the very material of his mind.
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What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe?
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The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
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There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain, So many clappers going without bells, That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister, The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke, A single text, granite monotony
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If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
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His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the solider dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.
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Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.
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I can Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them, Like men besides, like men in light secluded, Enjoying angels.
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A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.
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They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational,Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street, I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
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The boots of the men clump On the boards of the bridge. The first white wall of the village Rises through fruit-trees. Of what was it I was thinking? So the meaning escapes.