Marianne Moore Quotes

And whence is courage: the unanswered question, the resolute doubt, — dumbly calling, deafly listening — that in misfortune, even death, encourages others and in its defeat, stirs the soul to be strong?

The pulse of intention does not move so that one
Can see it, and moral machinery is not labelled, but
The future of time is determined by the power of volition.

...discovering Antarctica, its penguin kings and icy spires...

I look upon verse as an exercise in composition.

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.

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

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

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.

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

I never plan a stanza, words cluster like chromosomes determining the procedure, later, I may influence or thin it.

the power of relinquishing
what one would keep; that is freedom. Become dinosaur-
skulled, quilled or salamander-wooled, more ironshod
and javelin-dressed than a hedgehog battalion of steel, but be
dull. Don’t be envied or
armed with a measuring rod.

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

One may be pardoned, yes I know one may, for love for love, undying (Ephesians 6:24)

Omissions are not accidents.

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