Marianne Moore Quotes

I have no sympathy for people who find unpopularity embittering.

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

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

Might verse not best confuse itself with fate?

Your thorns are the best part of you.

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

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

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

"As for "A Grave," it has a significance apart from the literal origin, which was a man who
placed himself between my mother and me, and the surf we were watching from the
middle ledge of rocks on Monhegan Island [in Maine] after the storm. ("Don't be
annoyed," my mother said. "It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.")"

The cure for loneliness is solitude.

... The world's an orphan's home. Shall
we never have peace without sorrow?
without pleas of the dying for
help that won't come? O
quiet form upon the dust, I cannot
look and yet I must. If these great patient
dyings - all these agonies
and wound bearings and bloodshed-
can teach us how to live, these
dyings were not wasted.

I think books are chiefly responsible for my dogged self determined efforts to write; books & verisimilitude; I like to describe things.

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

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

I have been influenced by the Bible, Bach's music and contemporarily by Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hopkins.