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To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

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
Live
World
Conceptions
Existing
Conception
Outside

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Poetry is the scholar's art.
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After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.
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A violent order is disorder and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
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Words of the world are the life of the world.
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Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
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Man is an eternal sophomore.
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The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
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It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
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The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.
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The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
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Of what is real I say, Is it the old, the roseate parent or The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
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Poetry increases the feeling for reality.
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Disillusion is the last illusion.
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At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.
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The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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.
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Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
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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