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I've decided to build my cult up around Wallace Stevens quotes. I never knew he thought up such witty, sagacious, interesting things, much less wrote them down.

"Style is not something applied. It is something inherent, something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress. It may be said to be a voice that is inevitable. A man has no choice about his style. When he says I am my style the truth reminds him that it is his style that is himself. If he says, as my poem is, so are my gods and so am I, the truth remains quiet and broods on what he has said. He knows that the gods of China are Chinese; that the gods of Greece are always Greeks and that all gods are created in the images of their creators; and he see in these circumstances the operation of a sytle, a basic law. He observes the uniform enhancement of all things within the category of the imagination. He sees, in the struggle between the perfectible and the imperfectible, how the perfectible prevails, even though it falls short of perfection." -- "Two or Three Ideas"

( more Stevens goodies )