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As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

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
Terrible
Grows
Literature
Life

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
Wallace Stevens
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The winter is made and you have to bear it, The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind, For all the thoughts of summer that go with it In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.
Wallace Stevens
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Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
Wallace Stevens
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An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
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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Realism is a corruption of reality.
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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We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.
Wallace Stevens
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
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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What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Wallace Stevens
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The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
Wallace Stevens
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I do not know which to prefer - The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.
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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I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
Wallace Stevens
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The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
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