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

More quotes by 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
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Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.
Marianne Moore
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Men are monopolists of stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness.
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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Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral he could handle any missile.
Marianne Moore
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Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
Marianne Moore
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Your thorns are the best part of you.
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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Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.
Marianne Moore
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Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty.
Marianne Moore
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I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.
Marianne Moore
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The hands are the heart's messengers.
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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They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.
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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that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.
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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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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[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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The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself.
Marianne Moore