Marianne Moore quotes:

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

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Omissions are not accidents.

the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell buoys, advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink-- in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.

Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt.

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.

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

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

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

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

[On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing, is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber.

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

Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.

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

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

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.

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

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.

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

The mind is an enchanting thing.

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

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.

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

... 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.

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

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

Superior people never make long visits.

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

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

[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.

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.

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

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

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

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

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

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

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

A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague.

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

All are / naked, none is safe.

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

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

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

Below the incandescent stars / below the incandescent fruit, / the strange experience of beauty; / its existence is too much; / it tears one to pieces / and each fresh wave of consciousness / is poison.

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

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

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

Excess is the common substitute for energy.

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death.

Life is energy, and energy is creativity. And even when individuals pass on, the energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it.

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

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

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

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

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

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

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

Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.

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

Revision is its own reward.

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 ...

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!

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

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 deft white-stockinged dance in thick-soled shoes! Denmark's sanctuaried Jews!

The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.

The hands are the heart's messengers.

The heart that gives, gathers.

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.

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

The power of the visible is the invisible.

The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, "Again the sun! anew each day; and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul."

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

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

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

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

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

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.

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.

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

To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it.

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

We are suffering from too much sarcasm.

We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.

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

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

We prove, we do not explain, our birth,

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

What is our innocence, What is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.

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?

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

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

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

Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?

Writing is an undertaking for the modest.

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

Your thorns are the best part of you.

There never was a war that was not inward.

Victory won't come