Quote

If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.

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
Humans
Eyes
Brows
Even
Eye
Wider
Men
Less
Primitive
Like
Seems
Stands
Emblem
Body
Ears
Emblems
Persons
Large
Taller
Person
Hero
Brow
Human
Stand
Heroines

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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The reader became the book and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
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Poetry increases the feeling for reality.
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The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.
Wallace Stevens
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In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.
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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The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
Wallace Stevens
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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
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We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
Wallace Stevens
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The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
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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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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.
Wallace Stevens
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An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.
Wallace Stevens
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Man is an eternal sophomore.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
Wallace Stevens
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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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Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
Wallace Stevens
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The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens