"Life is the elimination of what is dead."
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Quote collection
Wallace Stevens quotes (page 7 of 14)
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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."
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"It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice."
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"Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass."
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"Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into."
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"I am what is around me."
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"The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book."
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"Next to love is the desire for love."
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"A change of style is a change of meaning."
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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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"I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door."
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"The mind can never be satisfied."
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"It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are."
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"We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy."
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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."
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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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"The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become."
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"The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives."
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"The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things."
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"Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier."
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