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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
Cross
Crosses
Tell
Trying
Think
Thinking
Impassable
Appears

More quotes by 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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When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.
Marianne Moore
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Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.
Marianne Moore
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that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.
Marianne Moore
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It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
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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Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral he could handle any missile.
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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Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.
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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The heart that gives, gathers.
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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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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The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself.
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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The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.
Marianne Moore
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Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.
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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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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Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go.
Marianne Moore