Marianne Moore Quotes

... we
do not admire what
we cannot understand.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.

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.

A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes.

The power of the visible
is the invisible; as even where
no tree of freedom grows,
so-called brute courage knows.

nor are there any
ivory
tusks like those two horns which when a tiger
coughs, are lowered fiercely
and convert the fur
to harmless rubbish.

"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."

Your thorns are the best part of you.

In the days of Prismatic Color
not 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

Durer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this

Who rides on a tiger can never dismount; asleep on an elephant, that is repose.

Superior people never make long visits.

that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.

What of it? We call them brave perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come when no one will fight for anything and there's nothing of worth to save.

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