"They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'"
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Quote collection
Wallace Stevens quotes (page 5 of 14)
274 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession."
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"What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality."
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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."
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"Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires."
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"There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured As April's green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow's wings."
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"One's ignorance is one's chief asset."
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"Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud."
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"If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism."
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"Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art."
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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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"New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors."
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"God is in me or else is not at all."
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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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"The imagination is man's power over nature."
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"After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends."
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"It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur."
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"The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?"
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"Poetry is a means of redemption."
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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."
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