Quotes by Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Alive from: 1879-1955

Category: Poets (Contemporary)

Quotes 1 till 15 of 29.

• Wallace Stevens

  

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  All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

• Wallace Stevens

  

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  As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

• Wallace Stevens

  

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  Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

• 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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  How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

• Wallace Stevens

  

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  How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

• 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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  Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

• Wallace Stevens

  

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  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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  Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

• 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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  One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

• 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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  Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

• Wallace Stevens

  

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  Poetry is the supreme fiction.