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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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Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
Wallace Stevens
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I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
Wallace Stevens
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The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
Wallace Stevens
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Words of the world are the life of the world.
Wallace Stevens
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Imagination is the will of things. . . .
Wallace Stevens
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It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.
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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In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.
Wallace Stevens
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Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
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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The sea Severs not only lands but also selves.
Wallace Stevens
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
Wallace Stevens
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Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
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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Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Wallace Stevens
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The word is the making of the world
Wallace Stevens
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God and the imagination are one.
Wallace Stevens
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To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
Wallace Stevens
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The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
Wallace Stevens