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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
Existing
Conception
Outside
Live
World
Conceptions

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.
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Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.
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I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
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Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
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Poetry increases the feeling for reality.
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The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.
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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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The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
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I am what is around me.
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After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.
Wallace Stevens
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How cold the vacancy When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist First sees reality. The mortal no Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.
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It is the belief and not the god that counts.
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Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
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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 poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
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It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
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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.
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It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
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The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.
Wallace Stevens