Marianne Moore Quotes

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

« No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles ». No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculpture
flowers - at ease and tall. The king is dead.

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!

The hands are the heart's messengers.

A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes.

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

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.

Omissions are not accidents.

repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of
the sea;
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

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?

"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.")"

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 ...

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 self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most constant aim.