Marianne Moore
Among animals, one has a sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.Collection: Animal
What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.Collection: Writing
There is no pleasure subtler than the sensation of being a good workman; and in work there is the sense of consanguinity-unconscious as a rule but sometimes conscious.Collection: Work
The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, "Again the sun! anew each day; and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul."Collection: Fear
I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.Collection: Reading
The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself.Collection: Strong
Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.Collection: Men
A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.Collection: Writing
he who gives quickly gives twice / in nothing so much as in a letter.Collection: Giving
A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague.Collection: Mastery
Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.Collection: Life
They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.Collection: Fighting
O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven-of silk-worm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!Collection: Power
I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do itCollection: Poet
Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister.Collection: Fall
Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral; he could handle any missile.Collection: Capes
Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.Collection: Christmas
I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.Collection: Time
Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go.Collection: Baseball
The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don't want things done for them.Collection: Always Trying
As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.Collection: Butterfly
To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it.Collection: Foxes
that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.Collection: Impossible
Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.Collection: Imagination
One must be as clear as one's natural reticence allows one to be.Collection: Natural
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.Collection: Wings
In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.Collection: Mind
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.Collection: Ocean
I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false.Collection: Believe
When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.Collection: Honesty
Wolf's wool is the best of wool, / but it cannot be sheared because / the wolf will not comply.Collection: Wool
The power of the visible is the invisible.Collection: Angel
One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.Collection: Writing
... we do not admire what we cannot understand.Collection: Admire
The mind is an enchanting thing.Collection: Mind
I never 'plan' a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.Collection: Procedures
When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.Collection: Art
The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish.Collection: Sweet
War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.Collection: Peace