Marianne Moore

“... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ...... if you demand on one hand,the raw material of poetry inall its rawness andthat which is on the other handgenuine, then you are interested in poetry.”

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

“Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.”

“Wolf's wool is the best wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves' surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He "gives his opinion and then rests upon it"; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much.”

“In the days of Prismatic Colornot in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam was alone; when there was no smoke and color was fine, not with the refinement of early civilization art, but because of its originality; with nothing to modify it but the mist that went up, obliqueness was a variation of the perpendicular, plain to see and to account for: it is no longer that; nor did the blue-red-yellow band of incandescence that was color keep its stripe”

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

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

“There never was a war that was not inward.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“My father used to say superior people never make long visits.”

“Poetry is all nouns and verbs.”

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

“Superior people never make long visits.”

“Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.”

“Psychology which explains everything, explains nothing.”

“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.”

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