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Below the incandescent stars / below the incandescent fruit, / the strange experience of beauty / its existence is too much / it tears one to pieces / and each fresh wave of consciousness / is poison.

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
Pieces
Consciousness
Strange
Incandescent
Existence
Poison
Beauty
Fresh
Stars
Wave
Experience
Fruit
Much
Tears

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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There is no pleasure subtler than the sensation of being a good workman and in work there is the sense of consanguinity-unconscious as a rule but sometimes conscious.
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Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?
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I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.
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You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.
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As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.
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Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.
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.
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Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.
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Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.
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Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
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Your thorns are the best part of you.
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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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[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 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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Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.
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The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your joy their joy? I wish I could believe it I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.
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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Superior people never make long visits.
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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Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral he could handle any missile.
Marianne Moore