Marianne Moore Quotations

Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.

As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.

When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.

Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt

In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.

There never was a war that was not inward.

The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

My father used to say superior people never make long visits.

You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.

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 deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint

anybody can write a book, 'cause everybody has a story to tell

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.

Not till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination"-above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." shall we have it.

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.

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.

Among animals, one has a sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.

I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.

The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion.

We prove, we do not explain, our birth,

Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.

Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.

Writing is an undertaking for the modest.

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.

Men are monopolists of "stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles"- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness.

Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible.

The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don't want things done for them.

Excess is the common substitute for energy.

The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish.

Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze.

They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.

... 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.

... we do not admire what we cannot understand.

The self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most constant aim.

The hands are the heart's messengers.

We are suffering from too much sarcasm.

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.

Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.

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."

My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard."

The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral; he could handle any missile.

Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.

Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.

A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.

Superior people never make long visits.

What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go...

Revision is its own reward.

All are / naked, none is safe.

[On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing, is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber.

In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.

I never 'plan' a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.

the small tuft of fronds or katydid legs above each eye, still numbering the units in each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth, to droop or rise

The mind is an enchanting thing.

he who gives quickly gives twice / in nothing so much as in a letter.

Hindered characters / seldom have mothers / in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers.

When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use ...

Concurring hands divide flax for damask that when bleached by Irish weather has the silvered chamois-leather water-tightness of a skin.

The deft white-stockinged dance in thick-soled shoes! Denmark's sanctuaried Jews!

[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.

repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell buoys, advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink-- in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.

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!

Victory won't come to me unless I go to it; a grape tendril ties a knot in knots till knotted thirty times

What is there in being able to say that one has dominated the stream in an attitude of self-defense; in proving that one has had the experience of carrying a stick?

At all events there is in Brooklyn something that makes me feel at home.

Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.

Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.

Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?

Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me ...

The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.

One must be as clear as one's natural reticence allows one to be.

We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.

A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague.

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.

We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave.

So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths ...

that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.

Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.

To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it.

You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.

When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.

Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty.

It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death.

One detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one's detachment.