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It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.

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
Sound
Block
Words
Weather
Woman
Sounds
Fragrance
Self
Perception
Sovereign
Thing
Poet
Solid
Never
Poetry
Version
Time
Color
Versions
Lord
Manner

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
Wallace Stevens
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Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
Wallace Stevens
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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens
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Make the visible a little hard to see.
Wallace Stevens
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The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again.
Wallace Stevens
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The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.
Wallace Stevens
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Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Wallace Stevens
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Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
Wallace Stevens
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Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
Wallace Stevens
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Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
Wallace Stevens
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The winter is made and you have to bear it, The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind, For all the thoughts of summer that go with it In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
Wallace Stevens
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in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
Wallace Stevens
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After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
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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behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
Wallace Stevens