Fatherhood Quote by Marianne Moore

“Superior people never make long visits” lands like a perfectly timed exit line: polite on the surface, quietly barbed underneath. Marianne Moore frames it as inherited wisdom, which gives the remark the authority of family lore while letting her keep her own hands clean. It’s not Moore boasting; it’s Moore ventriloquizing a father’s maxim, then letting the reader feel the chill of its social logic.

The intent is less about literal visiting etiquette than about a whole moral aesthetic: restraint as virtue, distance as refinement. “Superior” is the provocation. The word smuggles hierarchy into something that might otherwise sound like simple good manners. It implies that lingering is a kind of neediness, that taking up space (and time, and attention) is faintly indecent. The “long visit” becomes a metaphor for excess: emotional, conversational, even artistic. Knowing when to leave is cast as a sign of intelligence and self-command.

Moore wrote in an era where social codes were both strict and suffocating, especially for women. The line captures that tightrope: be engaged but not demanding; be present but not consuming. It also echoes her poetic sensibility. Moore’s work is famous for precision, compression, the disciplined cut. The subtext: the superior person edits themselves in real time.

There’s wit in how the sentence flatters and disciplines at once. It offers the reader an aspirational identity (“superior”) while issuing a warning: stay too long, and you’ve revealed your rank.