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We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.

Marianne Moore

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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
Devil
Resorts
Birth
Remained
Magic
Conformity
Heaven
Traits
Black
Tool
Foreordained
Ends
Logic
Diverge
Earth
Tools
Trait
None
Resort

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There is no pleasure subtler than the sensation of being a good workman and in work there is the sense of consanguinity-unconscious as a rule but sometimes conscious.
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Superior people never make long visits.
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You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.
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What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.
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Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
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Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.
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that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.
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The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.
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Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast each with a splendor which man in all his vileness cannot set aside each with an excellence!
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The mind is an enchanting thing.
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A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.
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[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.
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Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
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Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.
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Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.
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What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.
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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.
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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.
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Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.
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Writing is an undertaking for the modest.
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