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Quote by Wallace Stevens

“It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do wIth our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”

Quote by Wallace Stevens

Work

The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

This book is a compilation of essays that delve into the intricate connections between the tangible world and the realm of the imagination. The author examines how our perceptions of reality are shaped by our creative thoughts and dreams. more

Author

Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American poet known for his unique modernist style and philosophical reflections. His poetry often explores the connection between abstract concepts and everyday life, and is considered one of the most influential poets of the 20th century. more

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“A good thing to do is to think about what people have done. Not only people that you've read about in books or seen on the news or heard mentioned in deliberate conversation, and not only deeds that are noteworthy. It's good to think about all the possibilities of what people have probably done. The scope of what's possible, statistical probabilities of unique behavior and unusual action in the 200,000 years that people have existed because there are more than 7 billion of us alive right now and that's not including the number of people who have ever lived. Within those numbers exist captivating, eccentric, strange, fanciful variation, when you consider what people have probably done. Like, every time you've had an impulse that you've held back, imagine that there has been a person who has had that same impulse and gone through with it, because there probably has been. Imagine any type of person and any type of story having happened because when you do that, it feels like you're creating, but you're probably not. Imagine, considering the magnitude of these numbers and the variables within each human being, that all possibilities have occurred. If physical anomalies like twins born with bodies totally fused together resembling two-headed, eight limbed, human spiders, or a man born with a shrunken female head affixed to the back of his own head, which was animated without being consciously controlled by him, then imagine that anything you can imagine has occurred. However typical or atypical, these things you're imagining have happened. These people you're thinking of have been.”

“There may very well have been a tennis player named Dennis whose only reason for playing tennis was for the thrill of the rhyme. There may have even been two Tennis Dennises. In fact, with billions and billions of people, 200,000 years, give or take the years before tennis was a sport, there may have even been three. You might find that thinking this way expands your freedom, your consideration of your own capability, the spectrum of what all people can be, and can do.”

“Everything reminded him of something else: the fragrance of a peach-skin was like opening his stamp-album, the chack-chack of the wheatear not only recalled mist on the hills, but also reminded him of foxgloves, droplets of rain tapping from the mauve bells on to a dock leaf or fern. Ferns reminded him of his mother's soap, the luxurious tan-coloured lozenges that came to her in a box each christmas and birthday, and other scents too, the yellow of oriental jasmine, the pink of tea-rose, the green of mimosa. For all of these scents he could find a correlative within the spectrum of his own experience.”