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It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

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
Amateur
Originality
Necessary
Courage

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
Wallace Stevens
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
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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I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.
Wallace Stevens
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Imagination is the will of things. . . .
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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Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
Wallace Stevens
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in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
Wallace Stevens
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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
Wallace Stevens
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The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.
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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The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
Wallace Stevens
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Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
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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The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
Wallace Stevens
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The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.
Wallace Stevens
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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Wallace Stevens
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The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?
Wallace Stevens
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A change of style is a change of meaning.
Wallace Stevens