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As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

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
Conceive
Butterfly
Hardly
Vain
Exists
Congruence
Question
Butterflies
Upon
Complement
Attending

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The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion.
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Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.
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They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.
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that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.
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Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.
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Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral he could handle any missile.
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You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.
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The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, Again the sun! anew each day and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul.
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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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One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.
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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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Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.
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Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast each with a splendor which man in all his vileness cannot set aside each with an excellence!
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Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.
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I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
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Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go.
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Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?
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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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When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.
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repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
Marianne Moore