Marianne Moore Quotes

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 ...

This is a strange fraternity — these sea lions and land lions, land unicorns and sea unicorns; the lion civilly rampant, tame and concessive like the long-tailed bear of Ecuador — the lion standing up against this screen of woven air which is the forest: the unicorn also, on its hind legs in reciprocity.

My father used to say "Superior people never make long visits."

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

'Hebrew poetry is, prose with a sort of heightened consciousness' Ecstasy affords the occasion expediency, determines the form

If you demand on the other hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry.

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

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

Tell me, Tell me where might there be a refuge for me
from egocentricity
and its propensity to bisect, mis-state, misunderstand
and obliterate continuity?

In Homer, existence
is flawed; transcendence, conditional; ' the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual',

There never was a war that was
not inward; I must fight till I conquered in myself what
causes war

There is hate's crown beneath which all is death; there's love without which none
is king.

Blessed the man whose faith is different
from possessiveness - of a kind not framed by 'things which do appear' ( Hebrews 11:3)

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

Yes, I believe in prayer, as a mystery which can endow one with more power perhaps than any other spiritual mystery, yet a mystery that cannot be exposited to a point where it is not a mystery.