Quote

After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

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
Need
Needs
Lustre
Hymn
Seducing
Hymns
Paradise
Moon

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Wallace Stevens
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Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.
Wallace Stevens
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Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
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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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.
Wallace Stevens
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People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.
Wallace Stevens
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I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
Wallace Stevens
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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Wallace Stevens
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Cold is our element and winter's air Brings voices as of lions coming down.
Wallace Stevens
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Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
Wallace Stevens
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I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
Wallace Stevens
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The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
Wallace Stevens
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The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
Wallace Stevens
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Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
Wallace Stevens
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The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
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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I am what is around me.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Wallace Stevens