Marianne Moore > Quotes

“Your thorns are the best part of you.”
― Marianne Moore

“... we
do not admire what
we cannot understand.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.”
― Marianne Moore

“The cure for loneliness is solitude.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Prose of Marianne Moore

“The hands are the heart's messengers.”
― Marianne Moore

“The heart that gives, gathers. ”
― Marianne Moore

“I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“There never was a war that was not inward.”
― Marianne Moore

“If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Superior people never make long visits.”
― Marianne Moore

“Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”
― 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, Complete Poems

“... 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.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“The self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most constant aim.”
― Marianne Moore

“Omissions are not accidents.”
― Marianne Moore

“You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather
than
an asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates form
we are justified in supposing
that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the
unit, stiff and sharp,
conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and
liking for everything
self-dependent, anything an

ambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, to
attempt through sheer
reserve, to confuse presumptions resulting from
observation, is idle. You cannot make us
think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are
brilliant, it
is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing
of pre-eminence. Would you not, minus
thorns, be a what-is-this, a mere
perculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, the
elements, or mildew;
but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance
without co-ordination? Guarding the
infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to
the 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

“Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.”
― Marianne Moore

“They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“You are not male or female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Poetry
...
... a place for the genuine,
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.”
― Marianne Moore

“[Marianne Moore's definition of genuine poetry] -- Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
― Marianne Moore

“The Student"

“In America,” began
the lecturer, “everyone must have a
degree. The French do not think that
all can have it, they don’t say everyone
must go to college.” We
incline to feel, here,
that although it may be unnecessary

to know fifteen languages.
one degree is not too much. With us, a
school—like the singing tree of which
the leaves were mouths that sang in concert—
is both a tree of knowledge
and of liberty—
seen in the unanimity of college

mottoes, lux et veritas,
Christo et ecclesiae, sapiet
felici. It may be that we
have not knowledge, just opinions, that we
are undergraduates,
not students; we know
we have been told with smiles, by expatriates

of whom we had asked, “When will
your experiment be finished?” “Science
is never finished.” Secluded
from domestic strife, Jack Bookworm led a
college life, says Goldsmith;
and here also as
in France or Oxford, study is beset with

dangers—with bookworms, mildews,
and complaisancies. But someone in New
England has known enough to say
that the student is patience personified,
a variety
of hero, “patient
of neglect and of reproach,"—who can "hold by

himself.” You can’t beat hens to
make them lay. Wolf’s wool is the best of 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 him 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

“Nevertheless"

you've seen a strawberry
that's had a struggle; yet
was, where the fragments met,

a hedgehog or a star-
fish for the multitude
of seeds. What better food

than apple seeds - the fruit
within the fruit - locked in
like counter-curved twin

hazelnuts? Frost that kills
the little rubber-plant -
leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can't

harm the roots; they still grow
in frozen ground. Once where
there was a prickley-pear -

leaf clinging to a barbed wire,
a root shot down to grow
in earth two feet below;

as carrots from mandrakes
or a ram's-horn root some-
times. Victory won't come

to me unless I go
to it; a grape tendril
ties a knot in knots till

knotted thirty times - so
the bound twig that's under-
gone and over-gone, can't stir.

The weak overcomes its
menace, the strong over-
comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap
went through that little thread
to make the cherry red!”
― Marianne Moore

“I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.”
― Marianne Moore

“I must fight
Til I have conquered
In myself
what causes war”
― Marianne Moore

“...discovering Antarctica, its penguin kings and icy spires...”
― Marianne Moore

“I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of fabric is governed by gravity.”
― Marianne Moore

“Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems