Quote

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

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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
Writing
Dreams
Propositions
Life
Terrible
Writes
Race
Torn
Fear
Consists
Dream
Solitude
Incantations
Human
Defeat
Defeats
Humans
Fate
Compose
Whole
Poet
Eccentric

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Wallace Stevens
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The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go.
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 imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
Wallace Stevens
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The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
Wallace Stevens
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Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
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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The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.
Wallace Stevens
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The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
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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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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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.
Wallace Stevens
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Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
Wallace Stevens
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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Wallace Stevens
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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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Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
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