Wallace Stevens Quotes | Quotes by Wallace Stevens

Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor.
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They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.
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Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
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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.
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It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life...
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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
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You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
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Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
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To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
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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.
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It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
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There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than...
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To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.
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For the soldier of time, it breathes a summer sleep, ...
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The poet is the priest of the invisible.
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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
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Abba, dark death is the breaking of a glass. The dazzled flakes and splinters disappear. The seal is as relaxed as dirt, perdu.
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The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
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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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Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
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Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
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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.
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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
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Politic man ordained Imagination as the fateful sin. Grandmother and her basketful of pears Must be the crux for our compendia.
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