Top 120 Quotes & Sayings by Marianne Moore - Page 2

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

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

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

[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.

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

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.

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

Not 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.

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

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.

repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

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.

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

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

Revision is its own reward.

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.

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

... 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Writing is an undertaking for the modest.

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

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."

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast each with a splendor which man in all his vileness cannot set aside; each with an excellence!

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

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

[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.

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

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

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

The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your joy their joy? I wish I could believe it; I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.

We prove, we do not explain, our birth.

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