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The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
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
Belief
Else
Truth
Nothing
Willingly
Believe
Exquisite
Final
Finals
Fiction
More quotes by Wallace Stevens
One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent.
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The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
Wallace Stevens
The mind is smaller than the eye.
Wallace Stevens
I was the world in which I walked.
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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
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Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
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Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Wallace Stevens
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Wallace Stevens
People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.
Wallace Stevens
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
A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
Wallace Stevens
Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
Wallace Stevens
Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
Wallace Stevens
Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
Wallace Stevens
The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
Wallace Stevens
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.
Wallace Stevens
If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
Wallace Stevens
Disillusion is the last illusion.
Wallace Stevens
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens
Man is an eternal sophomore.
Wallace Stevens
