Quote

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
Question
Butterflies
Upon
Complement
Attending
Conceive
Butterfly
Hardly
Vain
Exists
Congruence

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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Concurring hands divide flax for damask that when bleached by Irish weather has the silvered chamois-leather water-tightness of a skin.
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It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
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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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The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.
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Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
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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.
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I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.
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Below the incandescent stars / below the incandescent fruit, / the strange experience of beauty / its existence is too much / it tears one to pieces / and each fresh wave of consciousness / is poison.
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Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?
Marianne Moore
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The mind is an enchanting thing.
Marianne Moore
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[The] whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the star on the steeple it is a privilege to see so much confusion.
Marianne Moore
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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.
Marianne Moore
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As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
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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Men are monopolists of stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness.
Marianne Moore
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What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.
Marianne Moore
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The power of the visible is the invisible.
Marianne Moore
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Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.
Marianne Moore
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One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.
Marianne Moore