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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
Never
Version
Versions
Thing

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
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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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Wallace Stevens
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The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
Wallace Stevens
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The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
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Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
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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All poetry is experimental poetry.
Wallace Stevens
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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
Wallace Stevens
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Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
Wallace Stevens
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If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.
Wallace Stevens
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We live in an old chaos of the sun.
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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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens
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One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent.
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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And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.
Wallace Stevens
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A violent order is disorder and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
Wallace Stevens
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the windy sky Cries out a literate despair.
Wallace Stevens