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.
Writing is an undertaking for the modest.
What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.
The heart that gives, gathers.
At all events there is in Brooklyn something that makes me feel at home.
We are suffering from too much sarcasm.
Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.
Concurring hands divide flax for damask that when bleached by Irish weather has the silvered chamois-leather water-tightness of a skin.
Omissions are not accidents.
I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
The weak overcomes its menace, the strong over-comes itself.
The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don't want things done for them.
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.
Wolf's wool is the best of wool, but it cannot be sheared because the wolf will not comply.
[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.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.
We prove, we do not explain, our birth.
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
Men are monopolists of "stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles"- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness.
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!