52 quotes
You are not male nor female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.
A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
Maine should be pleased that its animal
is not a waverer, and rather
than fight, lets the primed quill fall.
Shallow oppressor, intruder,
insister, you have found a resister.
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
Staff and effigy of the animal
which by shedding its skin
is a sign of renewal —
the symbol of medicine.
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
Some speak of things we know, as new;
And you, of things unknown as things forgot.
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
The problems is mastered — insupportably
tiring when it was impending.
Deliverance accounts for what sounds like axiom. The Gordian knot need not be cut.
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.
O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven — of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!
Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.
Poet of Affection (1977)
War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.
Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence.
I look upon verse as an exercise in composition.
What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.
I have learned more from Ezra Pound about writing than from anyone else.
I think books are chiefly responsible for my dogged self determined efforts to write; books & verisimilitude; I like to describe things.
There is an inevitable connection between music and poetry.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
My father used to say "Superior people never make long visits."
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)
Consume hostility;
employ your weapon in this meeting-place of surging enmity!
Insurgent feet shall not outrun
multiplied flames, O Sun.