Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
[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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Better
Cabinets
Wells
Fossils
Well
Quotations
Writing
Flies
Thing
Hence
Kind
Collection
Paraphrase
Collections
Amber
Use
Cabinet
More quotes by Marianne Moore
[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
Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.
Marianne Moore
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
The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.
Marianne Moore
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
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
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.
Marianne Moore
Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
Marianne Moore
The power of the visible is the invisible.
Marianne Moore
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.
Marianne Moore
... 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
Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
Marianne Moore
There never was a war that was not inward.
Marianne Moore
All are / naked, none is safe.
Marianne Moore
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!
Marianne Moore
Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.
Marianne Moore
Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.
Marianne Moore
The hands are the heart's messengers.
Marianne Moore
When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.
Marianne Moore
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