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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

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
Effects
Adhere
Loses
Ceases
Imagination
Unreal
May
Vitality
Ever
Maximum
Firsts
Cease
First
Effect
Adheres
Real
Extraordinary
Intensifies

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The mind can never be satisfied.
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It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
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Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
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The reader became the book and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
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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.
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It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.
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Words of the world are the life of the world.
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You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.
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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
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The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
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The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
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Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
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The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
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What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
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The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
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The imagination is man's power over nature.
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It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.
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The point of vision and desire are the same.
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The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.
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