Marianne Moore Quotes

Your thorns are the best part of you.
Marianne Moore
The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.
Marianne Moore
Superior people never make long visits.
Marianne Moore
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
Marianne Moore
I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish.
Marianne Moore
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
Marianne Moore
I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish.
Marianne Moore
When one is frank one's very presence is a compliment.
Marianne Moore
The enslaver is enslaved the hater harmed.
Marianne Moore
You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.
Marianne Moore
As contagion of sickness makes sickness contagion of trust can make trust.
Marianne Moore
Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.
Marianne Moore
I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it
Marianne Moore
Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
Marianne Moore
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.
Marianne Moore
You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability ratherthanan asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates formwe are justified in supposingthat you must have brains. For you, a symbol of theunit, stiff and sharp,conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority andliking for everythingself-dependent, anything anambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, toattempt through sheerreserve, to confuse presumptions resulting fromobservation, is idle. You cannot make usthink you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you arebrilliant, itis not because your petals are the without-which-nothingof pre-eminence. Would you not, minusthorns, be a what-is-this, a mereperculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, theelements, or mildew;but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliancewithout co-ordination? Guarding theinfinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience tothe remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re-membered too violently,your thorns are the best part of you.
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
In the days of Prismatic Colornot in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam was alone; when there was no smoke and color was fine, not with the refinement of early civilization art, but because of its originality; with nothing to modify it but the mist that went up, obliqueness was a variation of the perpendicular, plain to see and to account for: it is no longer that; nor did the blue-red-yellow band of incandescence that was color keep its stripe
Marianne Moore
TO VICTOR HUGO OF MY CROW PLUTO “Even when the bird is walking we know that it has wings.”—VICTOR HUGO Of: my crow Pluto, the true Plato, azzurronegro green-blue rainbow— Victor Hugo, it is true we know that the crow “has wings,” however pigeon-toe- inturned on grass. We do. (adagio) Vivorosso “corvo,” although con dizionario io parlo Italiano— this pseudo Esperanto which, savio ucello you speak too— my vow and motto (botto e totto) io giuro è questo credo: lucro è peso morto. And so dear crow— gioièllo mio— I have to let you go; a bel bosco generoso, tuttuto vagabondo, serafino uvaceo Sunto, oltremarino verecondo Plato, a
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
Psychology which explains everything, explains nothing.
Marianne Moore
You are not male or female, but a plandeep-set within the heart of man.
Marianne Moore
They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.
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
Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
Marianne Moore
Poetry...... a place for the genuine,Hands that can grasp, eyesthat can dilate, hair that can rise
Marianne Moore
... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ...... if you demand on one hand,the raw material of poetry inall its rawness andthat which is on the other handgenuine, then you are interested in poetry.
Marianne Moore