MARIANNE MOORE

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.

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

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.

We are suffering from too much sarcasm.

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

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

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

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.

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

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

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

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

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.

You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.

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

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

There never was a war that was not inward.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

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.

Superior people never make long visits.

Excess is the common substitute for energy.

In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.

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