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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
Upon
Complement
Attending
Conceive
Butterfly
Hardly
Vain
Exists
Congruence
Question
Butterflies

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Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.
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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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Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.
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Your thorns are the best part of you.
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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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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.
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the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell buoys, advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink-- in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.
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Writing is an undertaking for the modest.
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When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use.
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The heart that gives, gathers.
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Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.
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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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Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
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There never was a war that was not inward.
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As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
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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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Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
Marianne Moore
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Victory won't come to me unless I go to it a grape tendril ties a knot in knots till knotted thirty times
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that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.
Marianne Moore