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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

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
Escape
Reality
Clich
Metaphor

More quotes by 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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Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
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Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
Wallace Stevens
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The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
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 imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.
Wallace Stevens
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Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
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I am what is around me.
Wallace Stevens
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I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.
Wallace Stevens
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Cold is our element and winter's air Brings voices as of lions coming down.
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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It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Wallace Stevens
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Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
Wallace Stevens
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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
Wallace Stevens
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the windy sky Cries out a literate despair.
Wallace Stevens
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The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
Wallace Stevens
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Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.
Wallace Stevens
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Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
Wallace Stevens
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There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.
Wallace Stevens