Quotes by Marianne Moore

• Superior people never make long visits.
• The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.
• There never was a war that was not inward.
• You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.
• 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.
• Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt.
• I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
• The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.
• Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
• Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
• My father used to say superior people never make long visits.
• 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.
• It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
• 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.
• 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.
• We are suffering from too much sarcasm.
• Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.
• As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
• Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
• A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
• 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.