Quote

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.

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
Century
Preserved
Work
Device
Never
Expert
Unmatched
Like
Centuries
Blacksmiths
Devices
Reappear
Experts
Wary
Disappear
Unicorn
Caught
Wrought

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.
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Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
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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.
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One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.
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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.
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Poetry ... ... a place for the genuine, Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise
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Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.
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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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All are / naked, none is safe.
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There never was a war that was not inward.
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Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.
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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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Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.
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Omissions are not accidents.
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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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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.
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Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.
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They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.
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Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.
Marianne Moore
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Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
Marianne Moore