Quote

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.

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
Space
Rounds
Crack
Freedom
Breathe
Outward
Hate
Spread
Cracks
Wells
Neither
Grave
Well
Air
Horizon
Love
Liberty
Graves
Dome
Break
Native
Domes
Within
Round
Horizons

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
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The thinker as reader reads what has been written. He wears the words he reads to look upon Within his being.
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Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
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A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.
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You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.
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It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
Wallace Stevens
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Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
Wallace Stevens
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It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
Wallace Stevens
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The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
Wallace Stevens
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What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long?
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Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.
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Next to love is the desire for love.
Wallace Stevens
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God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
Wallace Stevens
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I do not know which to prefer - The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.
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 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.
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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens