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Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.

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
Poetry
Primal
Poetic
Necessity

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Omissions are not accidents.
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The hands are the heart's messengers.
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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.
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The heart that gives, gathers.
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All are / naked, none is safe.
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Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
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You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.
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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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One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.
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I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.
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What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.
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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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Excess is the common substitute for energy.
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... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
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The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself.
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Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
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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.
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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.
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I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
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