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... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Marianne Moore

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Marianne Moore
Age: 84 †
Born: 1887
Born: November 15
Died: 1972
Died: February 5
Essayist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Kirkwood
Missouri
Marianne Moore
Marianne Craig Moore
Garden
Materials
Demand
Rawness
Interested
Toads
Poetry
Gardens
Hand
Imaginary
Hands
Genuine
Real
Material

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It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
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Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.
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One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.
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When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.
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The mind is an enchanting thing.
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Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.
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There is no pleasure subtler than the sensation of being a good workman and in work there is the sense of consanguinity-unconscious as a rule but sometimes conscious.
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The heart that gives, gathers.
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Excess is the common substitute for energy.
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Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
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As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
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Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
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The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your joy their joy? I wish I could believe it I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.
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The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.
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Your thorns are the best part of you.
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In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.
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Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.
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Writing is an undertaking for the modest.
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There never was a war that was not inward.
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[On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing, is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber.
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