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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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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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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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Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
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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To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
Wallace Stevens
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It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
Wallace Stevens
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Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
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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We live in an old chaos of the sun.
Wallace Stevens
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Realism is a corruption of reality.
Wallace Stevens
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People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.
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
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God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
Wallace Stevens
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
Wallace Stevens
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Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.
Wallace Stevens
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As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Wallace Stevens
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The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
Wallace Stevens
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Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens