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The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don't want things done for them.

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
Cynicism
Done
Trying
Always
Things
Life
People
Cynics

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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Life is energy, and energy is creativity. And even when individuals pass on, the energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it.
Marianne Moore
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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.
Marianne Moore
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Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.
Marianne Moore
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Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.
Marianne Moore
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It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
Marianne Moore
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Writing is an undertaking for the modest.
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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All are / naked, none is safe.
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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You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.
Marianne Moore
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Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty.
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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When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.
Marianne Moore
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The mind is an enchanting thing.
Marianne Moore
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Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go.
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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One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.
Marianne Moore
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A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.
Marianne Moore