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Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

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
Conscious
Poetry
Death
Writing

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.
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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.
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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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Omissions are not accidents.
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You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.
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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 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 power of the visible is the invisible.
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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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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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.
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.
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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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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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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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It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
Marianne Moore
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Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.
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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When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.
Marianne Moore
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Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral he could handle any missile.
Marianne Moore