Quote

Writing is an undertaking for the modest.

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
Undertaking
Undertakings
Modest
Writing

More quotes by Marianne Moore

Image
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.
Marianne Moore
Image
What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.
Marianne Moore
Image
... 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
Image
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.
Marianne Moore
Image
[The] whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the star on the steeple it is a privilege to see so much confusion.
Marianne Moore
Image
Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty.
Marianne Moore
Image
As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
Marianne Moore
Image
Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
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
When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use.
Marianne Moore
Image
The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.
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
Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.
Marianne Moore
Image
Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.
Marianne Moore
Image
Omissions are not accidents.
Marianne Moore
Image
Victory won't come to me unless I go to it a grape tendril ties a knot in knots till knotted thirty times
Marianne Moore
Image
One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.
Marianne Moore
Image
Poetry ... ... a place for the genuine, Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise
Marianne Moore
Image
Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
Marianne Moore
Image
The heart that gives, gathers.
Marianne Moore