Marianne Moore Quotes

To cite passages is to pull one quill from a porcupine.

Subjects choose me… I lie in wait like a leopard on a branch-strained metaphor.

A connoisseur of tame excitement.

O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven-of silkworm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!

Omissions are not accidents.

I do not write for money or fame… One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensible to one’s happiness to express.

A place as kind as it is green, the greenest place I’ve never seen. Every name is a tune.

You are menaced by the goodness of your mechanics.

Nor was he insincere in saying, ‘Make my house your inn.’ Inns are not residencies.

If ‘compression is the first grace of style,’ you have it.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

It comes to this: of whatever sort it is, it must be ‘lit with piercing glances into the life of things’; it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.