Marianne Moore Quotes

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.

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

Your thorns are the best part of you.

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

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

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

Omissions are not accidents.

The hands are the heart's messengers.

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

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.

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

Superior people never make long visits.

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

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.

The mind is an enchanting thing.

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.

The power of the visible is the invisible.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.

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

Wolf's wool is the best of wool, / but it cannot be sheared because / the wolf will not comply.

There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war.

Excess is the common substitute for energy.

Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.

I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish.

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

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

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

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.

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

When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.

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

the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

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.

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.

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

Unconfusion submits its confusion to proof; it's not a Herod's oath that cannot change.

I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false.

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

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

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

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

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

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

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

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