Quotes from Marianne Moore

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

We are suffering from too much sarcasm.

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.

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

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

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

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 power of the visible is the invisible.

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

Your thorns are the best part of you.

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.

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.

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