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Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
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Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
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Thought
Certain
Epidemic
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Infection
Epidemics
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Thoughts
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More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.
Wallace Stevens
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New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Wallace Stevens
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Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
Wallace Stevens
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Of what is real I say, Is it the old, the roseate parent or The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
Wallace Stevens
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Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.
Wallace Stevens
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The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
Wallace Stevens
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I was the world in which I walked.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Wallace Stevens
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Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
Wallace Stevens
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To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
Wallace Stevens
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The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
Wallace Stevens
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On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.
Wallace Stevens
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What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Wallace Stevens
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Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
Wallace Stevens
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The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again.
Wallace Stevens
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Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Wallace Stevens
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All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
Wallace Stevens
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You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
Wallace Stevens
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Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.
Wallace Stevens