Quote

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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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Matter
Buzzing
World
Firmament
Description
Thus
Matters
Theory
Word
Making
Lisping

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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
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What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
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My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called standing people. . . .
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The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.
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Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
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God is in me or else is not at all.
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The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
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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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Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
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...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
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Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.
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True villains are extremely photogenic.
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If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
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If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
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If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
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in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
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After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
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