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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
Takes
Imagination
Place
Actuality
Presence
Extraordinary
Consciousness

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.
Wallace Stevens
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As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Wallace Stevens
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After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
Wallace Stevens
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There's no such thing as life or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.
Wallace Stevens
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Day after day, throughout the winter, We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason In a world of wind and frost.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
Wallace Stevens
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
Wallace Stevens
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Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens
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Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
Wallace Stevens
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Thought tends to collect in pools.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
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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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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God is in me or else is not at all.
Wallace Stevens
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The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again.
Wallace Stevens
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The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
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