Quote

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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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
Fabric
Gravity
Sentence
Maintain
Poem
Pull
Excitement
Sentences
Governed

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.
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.
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Excess is the common substitute for energy.
Marianne Moore
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Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
Marianne Moore
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Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty.
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What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.
Marianne Moore
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Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.
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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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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Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral he could handle any missile.
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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[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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When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use.
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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Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.
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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Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.
Marianne Moore
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Omissions are not accidents.
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