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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

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
Version
Versions
Thing
Never

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.
Wallace Stevens
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The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
Wallace Stevens
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Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
Wallace Stevens
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The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.
Wallace Stevens
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The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.
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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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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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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The reader became the book and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
Wallace Stevens
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The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Wallace Stevens
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For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens
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God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
Wallace Stevens
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To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
Wallace Stevens
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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
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There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.
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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Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
Wallace Stevens
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One's ignorance is one's chief asset.
Wallace Stevens
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in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
Wallace Stevens