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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
Exists
Congruence
Question
Butterflies
Upon
Complement
Attending
Conceive
Butterfly
Hardly
Vain

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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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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As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
Marianne Moore
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Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.
Marianne Moore
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What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.
Marianne Moore
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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.
Marianne Moore
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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.
Marianne Moore
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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.
Marianne Moore
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Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.
Marianne Moore
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Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister.
Marianne Moore
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Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
Marianne Moore
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The heart that gives, gathers.
Marianne Moore
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I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.
Marianne Moore
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So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths.
Marianne Moore
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Superior people never make long visits.
Marianne Moore
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We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.
Marianne Moore
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Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
Marianne Moore
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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.
Marianne Moore
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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.
Marianne Moore
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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
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Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.
Marianne Moore