Marianne Moore Quotes

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] 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.

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

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

There never was a war that was not inward.

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

O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven-of silk-worm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!

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.

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

To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it.

Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.

We are suffering from too much sarcasm.

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

Poetry ... ... a place for the genuine, Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise

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

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

The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

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

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

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

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

Revision is its own reward.

We prove, we do not explain, our birth.

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

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

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

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!

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

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?

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!

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

We don't like flowers that do not wilt; they must die, and nine she-camel hairs aid memory.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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