Quote

Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.

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
Keeps
Heaps
Blue
Shutting
Fans
Adjusting
Like
Crow
Injured
Shells
Ashes
Opening

More quotes by Marianne Moore

Image
Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister.
Marianne Moore
Image
The heart that gives, gathers.
Marianne Moore
Image
Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.
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
Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.
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
Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?
Marianne Moore
Image
As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
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
repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
Marianne Moore
Image
The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion.
Marianne Moore
Image
The mind is an enchanting thing.
Marianne Moore
Image
Superior people never make long visits.
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
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
Marianne Moore
Image
Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
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
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
A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.
Marianne Moore
Image
What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.
Marianne Moore