Marianne Moore Quotes - Page 3

Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.

I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish.

The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish.

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

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

Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.

... 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.

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

Unconfusion submits its confusion to proof; it's not a Herod's oath that cannot change.

All are / naked, none is safe.

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.

Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?

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

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

[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.

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

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.

So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths.

We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.

We prove, we do not explain, our birth.

We are suffering from too much sarcasm.

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

You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.

[The] whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so much confusion.