Marianne Moore Quotes

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.

Writing is an undertaking for the modest.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

We are suffering from too much sarcasm.

Omissions are not accidents.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

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

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

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

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

We prove, we do not explain, our birth.

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

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.

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

All are / naked, none is safe.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.

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

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

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

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

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

Revision is its own reward.

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

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

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.

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

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

Excess is the common substitute for energy.

Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.

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