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To be young is all there is in the world. . . . [Adults] talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and headaches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. . . . Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

—Wallace Stevens

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About Wallace Stevens

Portrait of Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer...

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I thought how utterly we have forsaken the earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards, and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.

—Wallace Stevens

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