Quote

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

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
Categories
Calling
Except
Poetry
Reason
Writing
Work
Category

More quotes by Marianne Moore

Image
Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.
Marianne Moore
Image
Concurring hands divide flax for damask that when bleached by Irish weather has the silvered chamois-leather water-tightness of a skin.
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
The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, 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.
Marianne Moore
Image
It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
Marianne Moore
Image
Below the incandescent stars / below the incandescent fruit, / the strange experience of beauty / its existence is too much / it tears one to pieces / and each fresh wave of consciousness / is poison.
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
Image
There never was a war that was not inward.
Marianne Moore
Image
As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
Marianne Moore
Image
I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.
Marianne Moore
Image
When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.
Marianne Moore
Image
Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.
Marianne Moore
Image
Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
Marianne Moore
Image
If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.
Marianne Moore
Image
Omissions are not accidents.
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
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
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
What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.
Marianne Moore
Image
the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell buoys, advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink-- in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.
Marianne Moore