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

More quotes by Marianne Moore

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Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister.
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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Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral he could handle any missile.
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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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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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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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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The heart that gives, gathers.
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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Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.
Marianne Moore
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Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.
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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All are / naked, none is safe.
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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Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
Marianne Moore
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Omissions are not accidents.
Marianne Moore
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One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.
Marianne Moore
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The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.
Marianne Moore
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The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself.
Marianne Moore
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Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty.
Marianne Moore