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Writing is an undertaking for the modest.

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
Modest
Writing
Undertaking
Undertakings

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty.
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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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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When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use.
Marianne Moore
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Poetry ... ... a place for the genuine, Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise
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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Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.
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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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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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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Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.
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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Excess is the common substitute for energy.
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.
Marianne Moore
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All are / naked, none is safe.
Marianne Moore
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that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.
Marianne Moore
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It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
Marianne Moore
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The heart that gives, gathers.
Marianne Moore
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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!
Marianne Moore
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Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.
Marianne Moore