Marianne Moore Quotes

104 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Marianne Moore
My father used to say,
'Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.'

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

Marianne Moore
"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint." Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my house your inn." Inns are not residences.

Marianne Moore
We should try to judge the work of others by the most that it is, and our own, if not by the least that it is, take the least into consideration.

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

Marianne Moore
I lie in wait like a leopard on a branch-strained metaphor.

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

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

Marianne Moore
Why an inordinate interest in animals and athletes? They are subjects for art and exemplars of it, are they not? minding their own business. Pangolins, hornbills, pitchers, catchers, do not pry or prey— or prolong the conversation; do not make us self-conscious; look their best when caring least.

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

Marianne Moore
The catnip that art is, or ignis fatuus, or drop on the cactus, does seem worth the martyrdom of pursuit.

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
The enslaver is
enslaved; the hater, harmed.

Marianne Moore
Wolf's wool is the best of wool,
but it cannot be sheared because
the wolf will not comply.

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

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

Marianne Moore
The world's an orphans' home. Shall we never have peace without sorrow? without pleas of the dying for help that won't come. O quiet form upon the dust, I cannot look and yet I must.

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 never knew anyone who had a passion for words who had as much difficulty in saying things as I do. I very seldom say them in a manner I like. If I do it's because I don't know I'm trying.

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

Marianne Moore
Honesty — however dangerous — should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.

Marianne Moore
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
O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven—of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!

Marianne Moore
Another armored animal — scale
lapping scale with spruce cone regularity until they form the uninterrupted central
tail row!

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