Quote

Excess is the common substitute for energy.

Marianne Moore

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Marianne Moore
Age: 84 †
Born: 1887
Born: November 15
Died: 1972
Died: February 5
Essayist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Kirkwood
Missouri
Marianne Moore
Marianne Craig Moore
Energy
Substitute
Substitutes
Excess
Common

More quotes by Marianne Moore

Image
They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.
Marianne Moore
Image
Poetry ... ... a place for the genuine, Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise
Marianne Moore
Image
Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.
Marianne Moore
Image
[On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing, is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber.
Marianne Moore
Image
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.
Marianne Moore
Image
Writing is an undertaking for the modest.
Marianne Moore
Image
Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.
Marianne Moore
Image
All are / naked, none is safe.
Marianne Moore
Image
Omissions are not accidents.
Marianne Moore
Image
In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.
Marianne Moore
Image
A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.
Marianne Moore
Image
The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself.
Marianne Moore
Image
What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.
Marianne Moore
Image
So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths.
Marianne Moore
Image
When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use.
Marianne Moore
Image
Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.
Marianne Moore
Image
Your thorns are the best part of you.
Marianne Moore
Image
The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don't want things done for them.
Marianne Moore
Image
Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.
Marianne Moore
Image
Men are monopolists of stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness.
Marianne Moore