Quotes from Marianne Moore

So he who strongly feels, behaves.

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.")

Blessed the geniuses who know that egomania is not a duty.

Blessed is the man who "takes the risk of a decision" — asks himself the question: "Would it solve the problem? Is it right as I see it? Is it in the best interests of all?

Appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.

Durer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this

Injudicious Gardening Fear is Hope

You're not free until you've been made captive by / supreme belief.

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 have no sympathy for people who find unpopularity embittering.

He feared snakes, and tamed Pharaoh's rat, the rust- backed mongoose. No bust of it was made, but there was pleasure for the rat. Its restlessness was its excellence; it was praised for its wit; and the jerboa, like it, a small desert rat, and not famous, that lives without water, has happiness.

one must not borrow a long white beard and tie it on and threaten with the scythe of time the casually curious

the power of relinquishing what one would keep; that is freedom. Become dinosaur- skulled, quilled or salamander-wooled, more ironshod and javelin-dressed than a hedgehog battalion of steel, but be dull. Don't be envied or armed with a measuring rod.

You've the beat of a dancer to a measure or harmonious rush of a porpoise at the prow where the racers all win easily— like centaurs' legs in tune, as when kettledrums compete; nose rigid and suede nostrils spread, a light left hand on the rein, till well—this is a rhapsody.

One ventures, commits one's self, and if readers are not pleased, one can perhaps please one's self and earn that slender right to persevere.

in which letters are written / not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand / but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!

No water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles ». No swan, with swart blind look askance and gondoliering legs, so fine as the chintz china one with fawn- brown eyes and toothed gold collar on to show whose bird it was. Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth candelabrum-tree of cockscomb- tinted buttons, dahlias, sea-urchins, and everlastings, it perches on the branching foam of polished sculpture flowers - at ease and tall. The king is dead.

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

But don't give me, if I can't have the dress, a trip to Greenland, or grim trip to the moon. The moon should come here. Let him make the trip down, spread on my dark floor some dim marvel, and if a success that I stoop to pick up and wear, I could ask nothing more.

America where there is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the street in the north; where there are no proof-readers, no silkworms, no digressions; the wild man's land; grassless, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand, but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!

To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough.

Might verse not best confuse itself with fate?

The pulse of intention does not move so that one Can see it, and moral machinery is not labelled, but The future of time is determined by the power of volition.