Marianne Moore Quotes - Page 4

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There never was a war that was not inward.

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

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

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

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 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."

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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!

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

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

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