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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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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
Trying
Think
Thinking
Impassable
Appears
Cross
Crosses
Tell

More quotes by 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.
Marianne Moore
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Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.
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When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use.
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.
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The mind is an enchanting thing.
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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Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister.
Marianne Moore
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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.
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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Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.
Marianne Moore
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that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.
Marianne Moore
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Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.
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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Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.
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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[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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You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.
Marianne Moore
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The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.
Marianne Moore
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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.
Marianne Moore
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It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
Marianne Moore