Marianne Moore quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Marianne Moore on Wise Famous Quotes.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.

Excess is the common substitute for energy.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral; he could handle any missile.

The self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most constant aim.

I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false.

A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague.

Discovering Antarctica, its penguin kings and icy spires ...

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?

Yule - Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner - of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.

To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it.

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.

The cure for loneliness is solitude.

The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don't want things done for them.

We are suffering from too much sarcasm.

We don't like flowers that do not wilt; they must die, and nine she-camel hairs aid memory.

The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.

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.

The power of the visible is the invisible.

Omissions are not accidents.

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go ...

Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.

All are / naked, none is safe.

Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

Unconfusion submits
its confusion to proof; it's
not a Herod's oath that cannot change.

One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express ...

You are not male or female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.

Hindered characters / seldom have mothers / in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers.

The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish.

Among animals, one has a sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.

Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

Concurring hands divide
flax for damask
that when bleached by Irish weather
has the silvered chamois-leather
water-tightness of a
skin.

The heart that gives, gathers.

At all events there is in Brooklyn
something that makes me feel at home.

What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.

The mind is an enchanting thing.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

Poetry
...
... a place for the genuine,
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise

Durer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this

The sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

Superior people never make long visits.

One detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one's detachment.

If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze.

We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave.

In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.

Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.

Men are monopolists of "stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles"- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness.

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.

Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?

So he who strongly feels, behaves.

One must be as clear as one's natural reticence allows one to be.

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

The deft white-stockinged dance in thick-soled
shoes! Denmark's sanctuaried Jews!

[Marianne Moore's definition of genuine poetry]
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty.

Victory won't come
to me unless I go
to it; a grape tendril
ties a knot in knots till
knotted thirty times

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible.

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.

As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.

Camels are snobbish
and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic
even murderous.
Reindeer seem over-serious.

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.

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.

That which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.

Revision is its own reward.

Originality is ... a by-product of sincerity.

The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself.

There never was a war that was not inward.

I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of fabric is governed by gravity.

Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt.

When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.

I must fight
Til I have conquered
In myself
what causes war

A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.

Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.

O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven-of silk-worm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!

My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard."

The hands are the heart's messengers.

It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.

You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.

What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.

We prove, we do not explain, our birth,

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish.

I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.

He who gives quickly gives twice / in nothing so much as in a letter.

When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use ...

Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me ...

They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.

Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.

Your thorns are the best part of you.

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.

When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.

Writing is an undertaking for the modest.