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The imperfect is our paradise.

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
Imperfect
Paradise

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
Wallace Stevens
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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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That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.
Wallace Stevens
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I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
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Of what is real I say, Is it the old, the roseate parent or The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
Wallace Stevens
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If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
Wallace Stevens
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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.
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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New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Wallace Stevens
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On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.
Wallace Stevens
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If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
Wallace Stevens
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Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
Wallace Stevens
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Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.
Wallace Stevens
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It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.
Wallace Stevens
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How red the rose that is the soldier
Wallace Stevens
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Disillusion is the last illusion.
Wallace Stevens