Marianne Moore Quotes

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

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

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? ~ Marianne Moore

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

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 ... ~ Marianne Moore

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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. ~ Marianne Moore

I must fight
Til I have conquered
In myself
what causes war ~ Marianne Moore

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

[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. ~ Marianne Moore

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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

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

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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 ~ Marianne Moore

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

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. ~ Marianne Moore

Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity. ~ Marianne Moore

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

As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust. ~ Marianne Moore

Writing is an undertaking for the modest. ~ Marianne Moore

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems. ~ Donald Hall

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

As the American poet, Marianne Moore, said: There is a great deal of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness. ~ William Strunk Jr.

The cure for loneliness is solitude. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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! ~ Marianne Moore

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

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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

All are / naked, none is safe. ~ Marianne Moore

The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space ... In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic. ~ Rebecca Solnit

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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

The power of the visible is the invisible. ~ Marianne Moore

Superior people never make long visits. ~ Marianne Moore

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

Your thorns are the best part of you. ~ Marianne Moore

Omissions are not accidents. ~ Marianne Moore

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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

The mind is an enchanting thing. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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

Originality is ... a by-product of sincerity. ~ Marianne Moore

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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

I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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

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

[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. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence. ~ Marianne Moore

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

The heart that gives, gathers. ~ Marianne Moore

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

That which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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

We prove, we do not explain, our birth, ~ Marianne Moore

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic. ~ John Burnside

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. ~ Marianne Moore

Poetry is all nouns and verbs. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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. ~ Marianne Moore

The hands are the heart's messengers. ~ Marianne Moore

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

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

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

Excess is the common substitute for energy. ~ Marianne Moore

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

Some days life kicks ye in the arse and all ye wanna do is hang from the trees. ~Marduk

If I, like Solomon,...
could have my wish-
my wish... O to be a dragon... ~Marianne Moore ~ Lana M. Wiggins

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

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. ~ Marianne Moore

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

To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it. ~ Marianne Moore

The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed. ~ Marianne Moore