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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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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
Use
Cabinet
Better
Cabinets
Wells
Fossils
Well
Quotations
Writing
Flies
Thing
Hence
Kind
Collection
Paraphrase
Collections
Amber

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
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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You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.
Marianne Moore
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The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, Again the sun! anew each day and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul.
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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Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral he could handle any missile.
Marianne Moore
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Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
Marianne Moore
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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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I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.
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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You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.
Marianne Moore
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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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The hands are the heart's messengers.
Marianne Moore
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Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
Marianne Moore
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Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?
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 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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Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.
Marianne Moore
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Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast each with a splendor which man in all his vileness cannot set aside each with an excellence!
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