About Marianne Moore: Marianne Craig Moore is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
One ventures, commits one's self, and if readers are not pleased, one can perhaps please one's self and earn that slender right to persevere.
The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.
Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
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.
We are suffering from too much sarcasm.
A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
Superior people never make long visits.
My father used to say superior people never make long visits.
Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.
Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.
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.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.
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.
Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.
If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.
As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
