Complete Poems Quotes

“... we
do not admire what
we cannot understand.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Wolf's wool is the best wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves' surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He "gives his opinion and then rests upon it"; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“... 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, Complete Poems

“Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“You are not male or female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Poetry
...
... a place for the genuine,
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron, iron is iron till it is rust. There never was a war that was not inward;”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of
the sea;
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“And whence is courage: the unanswered question, the resolute doubt,— dumbly calling, deafly listening—that in misfortune, even death, encourages others and in its defeat, stirs   the soul to be strong?”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Blessed is the man who “takes the risk of a decision” —
asks himself the question: “Would it solve the problem?
Is it right as I see it? Is it in the best interests of all?”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Blessed the geniuses who know
that egomania is not a duty.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Who rides on a tiger can never dismount; asleep on an elephant, that is repose.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says,
"I shall be there when the wave has gone by.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“So he who strongly feels, behaves.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“The power of the visible
is the invisible; as even where
no tree of freedom grows,
so-called brute courage knows.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron,
iron is iron till it is rust.
There never was a war that was
not inward; I must
fight till I have conquered in myself what
causes war, but I would not believe it.
I inwardly did nothing.
O Iscariot-like crime!
Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“... The world's an orphan's home. Shall
we never have peace without sorrow?
without pleas of the dying for
help that won't come? O
quiet form upon the dust, I cannot
look and yet I must. If these great patient
dyings - all these agonies
and wound bearings and bloodshed-
can teach us how to live, these
dyings were not wasted.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Might verse not best confuse itself with fate?”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“But don’t give me, if I can’t have the dress,
a trip to Greenland, or grim
trip to the moon. The moon should come here. Let him
make the trip down, spread on my dark floor some dim
marvel, and if a success
that I stoop to pick up and wear,
I could ask nothing more.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“You've the beat
of a dancer to a measure or harmonious rush
of a porpoise at the prow where the racers all win easily—
like centaurs' legs in tune, as when kettledrums compete;
nose rigid and suede nostrils spread, a light left hand on the
rein, till
well—this is a rhapsody.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“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, Complete Poems

“the power of relinquishing
what one would keep; that is freedom. Become dinosaur-
skulled, quilled or salamander-wooled, more ironshod
and javelin-dressed than a hedgehog battalion of steel, but be
dull. Don’t be envied or
armed with a measuring rod.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron
iron is iron till it is rust.
There never was a war that was
not inward; I must
fight till I have conquered in myself what
causes war, but I would not believe it.
I inwardly did nothing.
O Iscariot-like crime!
Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Like strangler figs choking
a banyan, not an explorer, no imperialist,
not one of us, in taking what we
pleased—in colonizing as the
saying is—has been a synonym for mercy.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems