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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

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.
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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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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I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.
Marianne Moore
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What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.
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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Life is energy, and energy is creativity. And even when individuals pass on, the energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it.
Marianne Moore
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When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.
Marianne Moore
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There never was a war that was not inward.
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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A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.
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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Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.
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] 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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Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty.
Marianne Moore
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All are / naked, none is safe.
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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that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.
Marianne Moore
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Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
Marianne Moore