Marianne Moore Quotes

... 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.

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

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.

Your thorns are the best part of you.

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

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

Injudicious Gardening Fear is Hope

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.

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

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

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

To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that
one has not looked far enough.

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

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

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.