Quote

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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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Walking
Fascinating
Stupid
Crowds
Everybody
Foolish
Tireless
Looking
Mirrors
Antagonistic
Interest
Interests
Horribly
Else
Field
Undoubtedly
York
Unreal
Fields
Crowd

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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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The imagination is man's power over nature.
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The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
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Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
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The sea Severs not only lands but also selves.
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Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
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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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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
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Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
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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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Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
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The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
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Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.
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The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.
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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
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