All Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Wallace Stevens
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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
Wallace Stevens
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In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Wallace Stevens
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If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
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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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
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The genuine artist is never "true to life." He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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