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We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.

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
Birth
Remained
Magic
Conformity
Heaven
Traits
Black
Tool
Foreordained
Ends
Logic
Diverge
Earth
Tools
Trait
None
Resort
Devil
Resorts

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.
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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Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
Marianne Moore
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Omissions are not accidents.
Marianne Moore
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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.
Marianne Moore
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Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
Marianne Moore
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Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.
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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Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.
Marianne Moore
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The mind is an enchanting thing.
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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Excess is the common substitute for energy.
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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The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself.
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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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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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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You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.
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