Best 114 quotes of Marianne Moore on MyQuotes

All are / naked, none is safe.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.

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.

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

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

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.

... 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.

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Omissions are not accidents.

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

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

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

[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.

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.