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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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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Reality
Many
Made
Realities
Consists

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.
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What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below.
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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 sea Severs not only lands but also selves.
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All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
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Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.
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The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
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Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.
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Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
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The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
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Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
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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.
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A change of style is a change of meaning.
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The imperfect is our paradise.
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in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
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The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.
Wallace Stevens
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Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.
Wallace Stevens
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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
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I am what is around me.
Wallace Stevens