Quote

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.

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
Play
Sees
Real
Genuine
Never
Aware
Life
Actors
Like
Artist
Art
True
Storming
Reality
Normally

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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The mind can never be satisfied.
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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
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The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.
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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
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Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
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The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.
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An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.
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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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Make the visible a little hard to see.
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It is the belief and not the god that counts.
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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
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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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This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
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Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
Wallace Stevens
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The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
Wallace Stevens
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All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.
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Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.
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It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.
Wallace Stevens