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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

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
Time
Modernism
Spend
Modern
Cannot
Many
Important
Things

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
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The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.
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.
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The reader became the book and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
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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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The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes.
Wallace Stevens
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At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Wallace Stevens
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They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
Wallace Stevens
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Man is an eternal sophomore.
Wallace Stevens
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The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Wallace Stevens
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Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud.
Wallace Stevens
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A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
Wallace Stevens
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The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
Wallace Stevens
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It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.
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The sea Severs not only lands but also selves.
Wallace Stevens
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The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
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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Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.
Wallace Stevens
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One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
Wallace Stevens
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To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
Wallace Stevens