Marianne Moore Quotes

America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the street in the north;
where there are no proof-readers, no silkworms, no digressions;

the wild man's land; grassless, linksless, languageless country in
which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!

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

I don't consider In Distrust of Merits a poem. It's just a burst of feelings. It's emotion recorded, a 'haphazard form ' a protest.

There is an inevitable connection between music and poetry.

You've the beat
of a dancer to a measure or harmonious rush
of a porpoise at the prow where the racers all win easily — like centaurs' legs in tune, as when kettledrums compete;
nose rigid and suede nostrils spread, a light left hand on the
rein, till
well — this is a rhapsody.

"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.

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

He feared snakes, and tamed
Pharaoh's rat, the rust-
backed mongoose. No bust
of it was made, but there
was pleasure for the rat. Its restlessness was
its excellence; it was praised for its wit;
and the jerboa, like it,

a small desert rat,
and not famous, that
lives without water, has
happiness.

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron
iron is iron till it is rust.
There never was a war that was
not inward; I must
fight till I have conquered in myself what
causes war, but I would not believe it.
I inwardly did nothing.
O Iscariot-like crime!
Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.

Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.

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

"The Student"

“In America,” began
the lecturer, “everyone must have a
degree. The French do not think that
all can have it, they don’t say everyone
must go to college.” We
incline to feel, here,
that although it may be unnecessary

to know fifteen languages.
one degree is not too much. With us, a
school — like the singing tree of which
the leaves were mouths that sang in concert — is both a tree of knowledge
and of liberty — seen in the unanimity of college

mottoes, lux et veritas,
Christo et ecclesiae, sapiet
felici. It may be that we
have not knowledge, just opinions, that we
are undergraduates,
not students; we know
we have been told with smiles, by expatriates

of whom we had asked, “When will
your experiment be finished?” “Science
is never finished.” Secluded
from domestic strife, Jack Bookworm led a
college life, says Goldsmith;
and here also as
in France or Oxford, study is beset with

dangers — with bookworms, mildews,
and complaisancies. But someone in New
England has known enough to say
that the student is patience personified,
a variety
of hero, “patient
of neglect and of reproach," — who can "hold by

himself.” You can’t beat hens to
make them lay. Wolf’s wool is the best of 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 him 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.

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

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.

I think books are chiefly responsible for my dogged self determined efforts to write; books & verisimilitude; I like to describe things.