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Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.

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
Revolutionist
Irrepressible
Imagination

More quotes by 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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Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
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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Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
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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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens
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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
Wallace Stevens
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True villains are extremely photogenic.
Wallace Stevens
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At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Wallace Stevens
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The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy.
Wallace Stevens
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Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.
Wallace Stevens
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It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
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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Realism is a corruption of reality.
Wallace Stevens
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Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
Wallace Stevens
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The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
Wallace Stevens
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The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
Wallace Stevens
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The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
Wallace Stevens
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Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
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It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
Wallace Stevens