Quotes from Marianne Moore

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

The sweet air coming into your house on afine day, from water etchedwith waves as formal as the scales on a fish.

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

To wear the arctic foxyou have to kill it.

I wonder what Adam and Evethink of it by this time.

The prey of fear, he, alwayscurtailed, 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."

O to be a dragon,a symbol of the power of Heaven—of silkwormsize or immense; at times invisible.Felicitous phenomenon!

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

As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.

My father used to say superior people never make long visits.

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

We are suffering from too much sarcasm.

When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand.

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron, iron is iron till it is rust. There never was a war that was not inward;

An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle In The Shape Of A Fish" Here we have thirst and patience, from the first, and art, as in a wave held up for us to see in its essential perpendicularity; Not brittle but intense--the spectrum, that spectacular and humble animal the fish, whose scales turn aside the sun's sword with their polish.

when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination" --above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have it.

When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.

Psychology which explains everything, explains nothing.

And whence is courage: the unanswered question, the resolute doubt,— dumbly calling, deafly listening—that in misfortune, even death, encourages others and in its defeat, stirs   the soul to be strong?

repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

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

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

Truth is no Apollo Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes. Know that it will be there when it says, "I shall be there when the wave has gone by.