Quotes from Marianne Moore

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

Your thorns are the best part of you.

we do not admire what we cannot understand.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.

The cure for loneliness is solitude.

The hands are the heart's messengers.

The heart that gives, gathers.

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

Superior people never make long visits.

There never was a war that was not inward.

Wolf's wool is the best wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves' surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He gives his opinion and then rests upon it; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much.

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

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.

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

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

Omissions are not accidents.

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

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

You are not male or female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.

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

Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine.

I must fight Til I have conquered In myself what causes war

discovering Antarctica, its penguin kings and icy spires...