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We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.

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
Insane
Truth
Littles
Little
Obsession

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Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
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Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
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Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
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The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
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I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
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All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
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I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
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Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.
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Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
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It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.
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God is in me or else is not at all.
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Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
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Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.
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I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.
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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
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The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
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