Marianne Moore

"I look upon verse as an exercise in composition."

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

"Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people."

"Yes, I believe in prayer, as a mystery which can endow one with more power perhaps than any other spiritual mystery, yet a mystery that cannot be exposited to a point where it is not a mystery."

"O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven — of silkworm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!"

"Consume hostility; employ your weapon in this meeting-place of surging enmity! Insurgent feet shall not outrun multiplied flames, O Sun."

"I dont consider In Distrust of Merits a poem. Its just a burst of feelings. Its emotion recorded, a haphazard form a protest."

"War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized."

"Poetry I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle, Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine."

"Hebrew poetry is, prose with a sort of heightened consciousness Ecstasy affords the occasion expediency, determines the form"

"So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths ..."

"I have been influenced by the Bible, Bachs music and contemporarily by Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hopkins."