Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Marianne Moore, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Marianne Moore quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 119 Marianne Moore quotes for you to read and share.
When dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, 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. -- Marianne Moore
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
All are / naked, none is safe. -- Marianne Moore
Yule - Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner - of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner. -- Marianne Moore
One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express ... -- Marianne Moore
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
It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back. -- Marianne Moore
The small tuft of fronds or katydid legs above each eye, still
numbering the units in each group;
the shadbones regularly set about the mouth, to droop or rise -- Marianne Moore
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan. -- Marianne Moore
If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze. -- Marianne Moore
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. -- Marianne Moore
Camels are snobbish
and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic
even murderous.
Reindeer seem over-serious. -- Marianne Moore
We don't like flowers that do not wilt; they must die, and nine she-camel hairs aid memory. -- Marianne Moore
What is
there in being able
to say that one has dominated the stream in an attitude of
self-defense;
in proving that one has had the experience
of carrying a stick? -- Marianne Moore
That which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder. -- Marianne Moore
[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
I must fight
Til I have conquered
In myself
what causes war -- Marianne Moore
Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me ... -- Marianne Moore
Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure. -- Marianne Moore
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
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. -- Marianne Moore
When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art. -- Marianne Moore
Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity. -- Marianne Moore
I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish. -- Marianne Moore
The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish. -- Marianne Moore
Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible. -- Marianne Moore
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
Concurring hands divide
flax for damask
that when bleached by Irish weather
has the silvered chamois-leather
water-tightness of a
skin. -- Marianne Moore
I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of fabric is governed by gravity. -- Marianne Moore
In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity. -- Marianne Moore
Men are monopolists of "stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles"- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness. -- Marianne Moore
Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion? -- Marianne Moore
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
Excess is the common substitute for energy. -- Marianne Moore
One ventures, commits one's self, and if readers are not pleased, one can perhaps please one's self and earn that slender right to persevere. -- Marianne Moore
A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself. -- Marianne Moore
O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven-of silk-worm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon! -- Marianne Moore
A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds. -- Marianne Moore
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
So he who strongly feels, behaves. -- Marianne Moore
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. -- Marianne Moore
The hands are the heart's messengers. -- Marianne Moore
When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand. -- Marianne Moore
The mind is an enchanting thing. -- Marianne Moore
Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others. -- Marianne Moore
Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people. -- Marianne Moore
One must be as clear as one's natural reticence allows one to be. -- Marianne Moore
The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed. -- Marianne Moore
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
Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man. -- Marianne Moore
I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it -- Marianne Moore
The deft white-stockinged dance in thick-soled
shoes! Denmark's sanctuaried Jews! -- Marianne Moore
Poetry
...
... a place for the genuine,
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise -- Marianne Moore
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. -- Marianne Moore
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence. -- Marianne Moore
I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false. -- Marianne Moore
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them ...
... if you demand on one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, then you are interested in poetry. -- Marianne Moore
When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use ... -- Marianne Moore
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
Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time. -- Marianne Moore
The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease. -- Marianne Moore
Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go ... -- Marianne Moore
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
Discovering Antarctica, its penguin kings and icy spires ... -- Marianne Moore
Originality is ... a by-product of sincerity. -- Marianne Moore
The self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most constant aim. -- Marianne Moore
As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust. -- Marianne Moore
Revision is its own reward. -- Marianne Moore
The heart that gives, gathers. -- Marianne Moore
Durer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this -- Marianne Moore
To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it. -- Marianne Moore
Unconfusion submits
its confusion to proof; it's
not a Herod's oath that cannot change. -- Marianne Moore
[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
Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt. -- Marianne Moore
Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity. -- Marianne Moore
And whence is courage: the unanswered question, the resolute doubt, - dumbly calling, deafly listening - that in misfortune, even death, encourages others and in its defeat, stirs the soul to be strong? -- Marianne Moore
When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment. -- Marianne Moore
Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination. -- Marianne Moore
War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized. -- Marianne Moore
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
In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind. -- Marianne Moore
When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser. -- Marianne Moore
What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it. -- Marianne Moore
Hindered characters / seldom have mothers / in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers. -- Marianne Moore
[Marianne Moore's definition of genuine poetry]
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. -- Marianne Moore
The cure for loneliness is solitude. -- Marianne Moore
If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist. -- Marianne Moore
A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague. -- Marianne Moore
Writing is an undertaking for the modest. -- Marianne Moore
Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty. -- Marianne Moore
There never was a war that was not inward. -- Marianne Moore
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it. -- Marianne Moore
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
You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief. -- Marianne Moore
We are suffering from too much sarcasm. -- Marianne Moore
You are not male or female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man. -- Marianne Moore
If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try. -- Marianne Moore
Omissions are not accidents. -- Marianne Moore
Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral; he could handle any missile. -- Marianne Moore
He who gives quickly gives twice / in nothing so much as in a letter. -- Marianne Moore
Among animals, one has a sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years. -- Marianne Moore
They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene. -- Marianne Moore
Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? -- Marianne Moore
We prove, we do not explain, our birth, -- Marianne Moore
At all events there is in Brooklyn
something that makes me feel at home. -- Marianne Moore
Conscious writing can be the death of poetry. -- Marianne Moore
One detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one's detachment. -- Marianne Moore
I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time. -- Marianne Moore
Superior people never make long visits. -- Marianne Moore
What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe. -- Marianne Moore
Your thorns are the best part of you. -- Marianne Moore
The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself. -- Marianne Moore
The power of the visible is the invisible. -- Marianne Moore
Poetry is all nouns and verbs. -- Marianne Moore
We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave. -- Marianne Moore
The sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. -- Marianne Moore
It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing. -- Marianne Moore
Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage. -- Marianne Moore
My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard." -- Marianne Moore
