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Marianne Moore
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“Your energies have wrought / Stout continents of thought.”
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“Your thorns are the best part of you.”
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“I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine.”
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“Nor till the poets among us can be / 'literalists of / the imagination' — above / insolence and triviality and can present / for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, / shall we have / it. ”
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“... we / do not admire what / we cannot understand ...”
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“There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious / fastidiousness.”
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“When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.”
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“... it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing ...”
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“... the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.”
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“... one detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one's detachment.”
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“... When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use ...”
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“The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.”
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“... he who gives quickly gives twice / in nothing so much as in a letter.”
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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.”
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“I wonder what Adam and Eve / think of it by this time ...”
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“Psychology which explains everything / explains nothing, / and we are still in doubt.”
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“... impatience is the mark of independence, / not of bondage.”
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“My father used to say, / 'Superior people never make long visits ...'”
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“Nor was he insincere in saying, 'Make my house your inn.' / Inns are not residences.”
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“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint. ”
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“All are / naked, none is safe.”
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“Wolf's wool is the best of wool, / but it cannot be sheared because / the wolf will not comply.”
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“Hindered characters / seldom have mothers / in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers.”
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“... you're not free / until you've been made captive by / supreme belief ... ”
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“I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.”
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“Among animals, one has a sense of humor. / Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.”
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“... the enslaver is / enslaved; the hater, harmed.”
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“As contagion / of sickness makes sickness, / contagion of trust can make trust.”
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“There never was a war that was / not inward; I must / fight till I have conquered in myself what / causes war ...”
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“Beauty is everlasting / and dust is for a time.”
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“... I can see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.”
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“Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty.”
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“As said previously, if what I write is called poetry it is because there is no other category in which to put it.”
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“One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express ...”
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“Omissions are not accidents.”
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“The mind is an enchanting thing.”
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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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“What I write can only be termed poetry because there is no other category in which to put it.”
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“Originality is ... a by-product of sincerity.”
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“Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”
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“A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.”
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“It ought to be work to read something that was work to write.”
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“... I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false.”
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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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“Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.”
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“In a poem, the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.”
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“Revision is its own reward.”
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“It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death.”
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“Honesty — however dangerous — should be as valuable as radium it seems to me ...”
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“... I never 'plan' a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.”
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“Poetry is all nouns and verbs.”
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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, U.S. poet, critic
(1887 - 1972)
Full name: Marianne Craig Moore.