Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American Modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.
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.
O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven-of silk-worm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!
The weak overcomes its menace, the strong over-comes itself.
If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.
Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
The self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most constant aim.
My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard. "
Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.
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.
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. "
Wolf's wool is the best of wool, but it cannot be sheared because the wolf will not comply.
They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.
A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.
The heart that gives, gathers.
The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your joy their joy? I wish I could believe it; I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.
Superior people never make long visits.
Concurring hands divide flax for damask that when bleached by Irish weather has the silvered chamois-leather water-tightness of a skin.
The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.
To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it.