Marianne Moore Quotes

china eyes and furry countenance confront the nymph’s large eyes — gray eyes that now are black, for she with controlled agitated glance explores the insect’s face and all’s a-quiver with significance. It is Goya’s scene of the tame magpie faced by crouching cats. Butterflies do not need home advice. As though the admiring nymph were patent-leather cricket singing loud or gnat-catching garden-toad, the swallow- tail bewitched and haughty,

The hands are the heart's messengers.

Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence.

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

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

O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven — of silkworm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!

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

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.

Poetry
...
... a place for the genuine,
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise

"As for "A Grave," it has a significance apart from the literal origin, which was a man who
placed himself between my mother and me, and the surf we were watching from the
middle ledge of rocks on Monhegan Island [in Maine] after the storm. ("Don't be
annoyed," my mother said. "It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.")"

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

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.

...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!

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.

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