Marianne Moore Quotes

104 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
Concurring hands divide

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

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

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

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

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