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Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

Wallace Stevens

Top 10 Best Quotes

“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.”

“It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.”

“There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.”

“Thought tends to collect in pools.”

“From Secret ManThe man of autumn, Behind its melancholy mask, Will laugh in the brown grass, Will shout from the tower’s rim. ”

“Secret Man" The sounds of rain on the roof Are like the sound of doves. It is long since there have been doves On any house of mine. It is better for me In the rushes of autumn wind To embrace autumn, without turning To remember summer. Besides, the world is a tower. Its winds are blue. The rain falls at its base, Summers sink from it.”

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

“From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a SunriseAll you need, To find poetry, Is to look for it with a lantern. ”

“From From the Journal of CrispinThere is a monotonous babbling in our dreams That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not The oncoming fantasies of better birth. ”

“Blanche McCarthy" Look in the terrible mirror of the sky And not in this dead glass, which can reflect Only the surfaces––the bending arm, The leaning shoulder and the searching eye. Look in the terrible mirror of the sky. Oh, bend against the invisible; and lean To symbols of descending night; and search The glare of revelations going by! Look in the terrible mirror of the sky. See how the absent moon waits in a glade Of your dark self, and how the wings of stars, Upward, from imagined coverts, fly.”

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Book Keywords:

autumn, courage, originality, life, philosophy, darkness, dreams, poetry, age, adagia, good-and-evil

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