Top 15 Marianne Moore Quotes

Your thorns are the best part of you.

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

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.

The cure for loneliness is solitude.

The hands are the heart's messengers.

The heart that gives, gathers.

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

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

There never was a war that was not inward.

Superior people never make long visits.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

"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."

... 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.

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

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