"How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?"
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Quote collection
Wallace Stevens quotes (page 2 of 14)
274 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We live in an old chaos of the sun."
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"The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have."
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"The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream."
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"Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken."
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"Like the Sweetness of Gardenias Mother, you died 15 years ago. pain, a rapier, cut until, finally, there was just peace like the sweetness of gardenias in the crystal vase on your yellow kitchen table. so fragrant. your voice lingers in my ear reminding, scolding, guiding a pleasant mantra of tenderness, magic words that move my palms, your palms. together we are molding, helping, creating. in the mirror I see your eyes, your beautiful brown circles looking back, so radiant. "don't forget me," you whispered the day you died. I won't."
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"A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman."
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"The poet makes silk dresses out of worms."
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"The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons."
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"Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking."
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"Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail."
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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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"The poet is the priest of the invisible."
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"Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers."
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"Disillusion is the last illusion."
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"Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential."
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"Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors."
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"God and the imagination are one."
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"Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor."
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"Sentimentality is a failure of feeling."
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