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Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

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
Peerless
Proficiency
Poetry
Imagination

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
Marianne Moore
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If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.
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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[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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Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.
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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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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When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use.
Marianne Moore
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The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself.
Marianne Moore
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Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
Marianne Moore
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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.
Marianne Moore
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Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.
Marianne Moore
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that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.
Marianne Moore
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A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.
Marianne Moore
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Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.
Marianne Moore
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Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.
Marianne Moore
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All are / naked, none is safe.
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
Marianne Moore
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The hands are the heart's messengers.
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