Marianne Moore Quotes

Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested ... liberate the imagination.

[Marianne Moore's definition of genuine poetry] — Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

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

Omissions are not accidents.

Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn, One can but say, "Farewell, good sense."

I think books are chiefly responsible for my dogged self determined efforts to write; books & verisimilitude; I like to describe things.

When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand.

So he who strongly feels, behaves.

America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the street in the north;
where there are no proof-readers, no silkworms, no digressions;

the wild man's land; grassless, linksless, languageless country in
which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!

There is hate's crown beneath which all is death; there's love without which none
is king.

Appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.

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

Yes, I believe in prayer, as a mystery which can endow one with more power perhaps than any other spiritual mystery, yet a mystery that cannot be exposited to a point where it is not a mystery.

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

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