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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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What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
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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Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
Wallace Stevens
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Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Wallace Stevens
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We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Wallace Stevens
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One must read poetry with one's nerves.
Wallace Stevens
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Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
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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The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Wallace Stevens
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God and the imagination are one.
Wallace Stevens
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Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
Wallace Stevens
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The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
Wallace Stevens
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Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
Wallace Stevens
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There's no such thing as life or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.
Wallace Stevens
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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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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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Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
Wallace Stevens
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Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
Wallace Stevens
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The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
Wallace Stevens
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Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.
Wallace Stevens