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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

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
Terrific
Survived
Literature
Spirit
Ever
Human
Humans
Contend

More quotes by 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.
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God is in me or else is not at all.
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It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
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I am what is around me.
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I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.
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We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.
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Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
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You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.
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We live in an old chaos of the sun.
Wallace Stevens
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I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
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The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.
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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On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.
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God and the imagination are one.
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.
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The point of vision and desire are the same.
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Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.
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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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