Quotes from Marianne Moore

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

I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of fabric is governed by gravity.

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

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.

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

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

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

There never was a war that was not inward.

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

The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.

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

Superior people never make long visits.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

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.

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?

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

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