175 Quotes by 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.

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

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

You are not male or female, but a plandeep-set within the heart of man.

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.

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron,iron is iron till it is rust.There never was a war that wasnot inward; I mustfight till I have conquered in myself whatcauses war, but I would not believe it.I inwardly did nothing.O Iscariot-like crime!Beauty is everlastingand dust is for a time.

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

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

America where thereis 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 inwhich letters are writtennot in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!