Marianne Moore Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure. — 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

Your thorns are the best part of you. — 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

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

TO A GIRAFFE
If it is unpermissible, in fact fatal
to be personal and undesirable
to be literal - detrimental as well
if the eye is not innocent-does it mean that
one can live only on top leaves that are small
reachable only by a beast that is tall? -
of which the giraffe is the best example -
the unconversational animal.
When plagued by the psychological,
a creature can be unbearable
that could have been irresistible;
or to be exact, exceptional
since less conversational
than some emotionally-tied-in-knots animal.
After all
consolations of the metaphysical
can be profound. In Homer, existence
is flawed; transcendence, conditional;
"the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual. — 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

We prove, we do not explain, our birth, — Marianne Moore

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

To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it. — Marianne Moore

The mind is an enchanting thing. — 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

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. — 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 enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed. — 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

The cure for loneliness is solitude. — 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

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time. — Marianne Moore

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

Wolf's wool is the best wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves' surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He "gives his opinion and then rests upon it"; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much. — Marianne Moore

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

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

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

Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one ... of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for precision. As George Grosz says, "In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist." The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not? Jacob Bronowski says in The Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering. In any case it's not established once and for all; it's evolving. — Marianne Moore

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

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

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

The power of the visible is the invisible. — Marianne Moore

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

Originality is ... a by-product of sincerity. — Marianne Moore

So he who strongly feels, behaves. — Marianne Moore

I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish. — Marianne Moore

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage. — 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

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence. — 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

ROSEMARY
Beauty and Beauty's son and rosemary -
Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly -
born of the sea supposedly, at Christmas each, in company,
braids a garland of festivity.
Not always rosemary - since the flight to Egypt, blooming differently.
With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath,
its flowers - white originally -
turned blue. The herb of memory,
imitating the blue robe of Mary,
is not too legendary
to flower both as symbol and as pungency.
Springing from stones beside the sea,
the height of Christ when thirty-three -
it feeds on dew and to the bee
"hath a dumb language"; is in reality
a kind of Christmas-tree. — Marianne Moore

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs. — Marianne Moore

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

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

That which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder. — Marianne Moore

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

Discovering Antarctica, its penguin kings and icy spires ... — Marianne Moore

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

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

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

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

There never was a war that was not inward. — Marianne Moore

Superior people never make long visits. — Marianne Moore

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

Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity. — Marianne Moore

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

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry. — Marianne Moore

Revision is its own reward. — Marianne Moore

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination. — Marianne Moore

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

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

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

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

Writing is an undertaking for the modest. — 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

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

An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle In The Shape Of A Fish
Here we have thirst
and patience, from the first,
and art, as in a wave held up for us to see
in its essential perpendicularity;
Not brittle but
intense
the spectrum, that
spectacular and humble animal the fish,
whose scales turn aside the sun's sword with their polish. — Marianne Moore

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

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

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

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

All are / naked, none is safe. — Marianne Moore

We are suffering from too much sarcasm. — Marianne Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Omissions are not accidents. — 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

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

Excess is the common substitute for energy. — Marianne Moore

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

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

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

BY DISPOSITION OF ANGELS
Messengers much like ourselves? Explain it.
Steadfastness the darkness makes explicit?
Something heard most clearly when not near it?
Above particularities,
these unparticularities praise cannot violate.
One has seen, in such steadiness never deflected,
how by darkness a star is perfected.
Star that does not ask me if I see it?
Fir that would not wish me to uproot it?
Speech that does not ask me if I hear it?
Mysteries expound mysteries.
Steadier than steady, star dazzling me, live and elate,
no need to say, how like some we have known; too like her,
too like him, and a-quiver forever. — Marianne Moore

The heart that gives, gathers. — Marianne Moore

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

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