Marianne Moore Quotes

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

We prove, we do not explain, our birth,

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.

Originality is ... a by-product of sincerity.

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

When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use ...

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.

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

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

All are / naked, none is safe.

The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish.

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

At all events there is in Brooklyn
something that makes me feel at home.

It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death.

Nevertheless"

you've seen a strawberry
that's had a struggle; yet
was, where the fragments met,

a hedgehog or a star-
fish for the multitude
of seeds. What better food

than apple seeds - the fruit
within the fruit - locked in
like counter-curved twin

hazelnuts? Frost that kills
the little rubber-plant -
leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can't

harm the roots; they still grow
in frozen ground. Once where
there was a prickley-pear -

leaf clinging to a barbed wire,
a root shot down to grow
in earth two feet below;

as carrots from mandrakes
or a ram's-horn root some-
times. Victory won't come

to me unless I go
to it; a grape tendril
ties a knot in knots till

knotted thirty times - so
the bound twig that's under-
gone and over-gone, can't stir.

The weak overcomes its
menace, the strong over-
comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap
went through that little thread
to make the cherry red!

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

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

[The] whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so much confusion.

Omissions are not accidents.

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

It has memory's ear
that can hear without
having to hear.
Like the gyroscope's fall,
truly unequivocal
because trued by regnant certainty,
it is a power of
strong enchantment. It
is like the dove-
neck animated by
sun; it is memory's eye;
it's conscientious inconsistency.

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.

When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand.

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

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

Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.

BY DISPOSITION OF ANGELS
Messengers much like ourselves? Explain it.
Steadfastness the darkness makes explicit?
Something heard most clearly when not near it?
Above particularities,
these unparticularities praise cannot violate.
One has seen, in such steadiness never deflected,
how by darkness a star is perfected.
Star that does not ask me if I see it?
Fir that would not wish me to uproot it?
Speech that does not ask me if I hear it?
Mysteries expound mysteries.
Steadier than steady, star dazzling me, live and elate,
no need to say, how like some we have known; too like her,
too like him, and a-quiver forever.

That which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.

When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.

ROSEMARY
Beauty and Beauty's son and rosemary -
Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly -
born of the sea supposedly, at Christmas each, in company,
braids a garland of festivity.
Not always rosemary - since the flight to Egypt, blooming differently.
With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath,
its flowers - white originally -
turned blue. The herb of memory,
imitating the blue robe of Mary,
is not too legendary
to flower both as symbol and as pungency.
Springing from stones beside the sea,
the height of Christ when thirty-three -
it feeds on dew and to the bee
"hath a dumb language"; is in reality
a kind of Christmas-tree.

Your thorns are the best part of you.

Camels are snobbish
and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic
even murderous.
Reindeer seem over-serious.

I must fight
Til I have conquered
In myself
what causes war

[On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing, is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber.

Unconfusion submits
its confusion to proof; it's
not a Herod's oath that cannot change.

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

We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave.

Life is energy, and energy is creativity. And even when individuals pass on, the energy is retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone will take the time and the care to unlock it.

Men are monopolists of "stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles"- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness.

To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it.

Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says,
"I shall be there when the wave has gone by.

The heart that gives, gathers.

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

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

Writing is an undertaking for the modest.

Excess is the common substitute for energy.

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.

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

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

Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.

The ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell
buoys,
advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which
dropped things are bound to sink
in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor
consciousness.

Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?

Among animals, one has a sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.

Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one ... of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for precision. As George Grosz says, "In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist." The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not? Jacob Bronowski says in The Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering. In any case it's not established once and for all; it's evolving.

The hands are the heart's messengers.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral; he could handle any missile.

The small tuft of fronds or katydid legs above each eye, still
numbering the units in each group;
the shadbones regularly set about the mouth, to droop or rise

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.

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.

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 ...

If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze.

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

Wolf's wool is the best wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves' surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He "gives his opinion and then rests upon it"; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much.

One detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one's detachment.

You are not male or female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.

The mind is an enchanting thing.

The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don't want things done for them.

[Marianne Moore's definition of genuine poetry]
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible.

Imaginary gardens with real toads in them ...
... if you demand on one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Concurring hands divide
flax for damask
that when bleached by Irish weather
has the silvered chamois-leather
water-tightness of a
skin.

Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?

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

When dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor 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.

Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.

The cure for loneliness is solitude.

Superior people never make long visits.

The power of the visible is the invisible.

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

The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.

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.

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

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

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.

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

Blessed is the man who "takes the risk of a decision" -
asks himself the question: "Would it solve the problem?
Is it right as I see it? Is it in the best interests of all?

He who gives quickly gives twice / in nothing so much as in a letter.

An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle In The Shape Of A Fish
Here we have thirst
and patience, from the first,
and art, as in a wave held up for us to see
in its essential perpendicularity;
Not brittle but
intense
the spectrum, that
spectacular and humble animal the fish,
whose scales turn aside the sun's sword with their polish.

I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.

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.

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

A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague.

I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish.

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

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

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather
than
an asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates form
we are justified in supposing
that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the
unit, stiff and sharp,
conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and
liking for everything
self-dependent, anything an

ambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, to
attempt through sheer
reserve, to confuse presumptions resulting from
observation, is idle. You cannot make us
think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are
brilliant, it
is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing
of pre-eminence. Would you not, minus
thorns, be a what-is-this, a mere
perculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, the
elements, or mildew;
but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance
without co-ordination? Guarding the
infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to
the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re-
membered too violently,
your thorns are the best part of you.

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.

I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of fabric is governed by gravity.

The sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.