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in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

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
Place
Actuality
Presence
Extraordinary
Consciousness
Takes
Imagination

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
Wallace Stevens
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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Wallace Stevens
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After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.
Wallace Stevens
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a means of redemption.
Wallace Stevens
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Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
Wallace Stevens
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I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.
Wallace Stevens
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They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
Wallace Stevens
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The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
Wallace Stevens
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
Wallace Stevens
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I was the world in which I walked.
Wallace Stevens
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Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
Wallace Stevens
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Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
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The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Wallace Stevens
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It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
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.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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Next to love is the desire for love.
Wallace Stevens
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Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
Wallace Stevens