Quote

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
Finals
Fiction
Belief
Else
Truth
Nothing
Willingly
Believe
Exquisite
Final

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.
Wallace Stevens
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To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
Wallace Stevens
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in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
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Disillusion is the last illusion.
Wallace Stevens
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Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.
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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It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
Wallace Stevens
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.
Wallace Stevens
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I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
Wallace Stevens
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I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
Wallace Stevens
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The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
Wallace Stevens
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It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is not free from its forms.
Wallace Stevens
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...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
Wallace Stevens
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Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
Wallace Stevens
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behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
Wallace Stevens
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
Wallace Stevens