Top 80 Marianne Moore Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The heart that gives, gathers.”

— Marianne Moore

2. “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.”

— Marianne Moore

3. “The cure for loneliness is solitude.”

— Marianne Moore

4. “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.”

— Marianne Moore

5. “Revision is its own reward.”

— Marianne Moore

6. “The mind is an enchanting thing.”

— Marianne Moore

7. “The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.”

— Marianne Moore

8. “To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it.”

— Marianne Moore

9. “The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion.”

— Marianne Moore

10. “I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false.”

— Marianne Moore

11. “When one is frank, one’s very presence is a compliment.”

— Marianne Moore

12. “Your thorns are the best part of you.”

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

14. “Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go...”

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

16. “One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one’s happiness to express...”

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

18. “O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven-of silk-worm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!”

— Marianne Moore

19. “The power of the visible is the invisible.”

— Marianne Moore

20. “There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war.”

— Marianne Moore

21. “The hands are the heart’s messengers.”

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

27. “Omissions are not accidents.”

— Marianne Moore

28. “Superior people never make long visits.”

— Marianne Moore

29. “Excess is the common substitute for energy.”

— Marianne Moore

30. “Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.”

— Marianne Moore

31. “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.”

— Marianne Moore

32. “One detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one’s detachment.”

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

34. “A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.”

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

36. “The self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most constant aim.”

— Marianne Moore

37. “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.”

— Marianne Moore

38. “I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.”

— Marianne Moore

39. “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.”

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

41. “Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.”

— Marianne Moore

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

— Marianne Moore

43. “Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron, iron is iron till it is rust. There never was a war that was not inward;.”

— Marianne Moore

44. “We don’t like flowers that do not wilt; they must die, and nine she-camel hairs aid memory.”

— Marianne Moore

45. “My father used to say, “Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard.””

— Marianne Moore

46. “Yule – Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner – of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.”

— Marianne Moore

47. “Men are monopolists of “stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles”- unfit to be the guardians of another person’s happiness.”

— Marianne Moore

48. “There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.”

— Marianne Moore

49. “You’re not free until you’ve been made captive by supreme belief.”

— Marianne Moore

50. “Who rides on a tiger can never dismount; asleep on an elephant, that is repose.”

— Marianne Moore