Marianne Moore Quotes

Your thorns are the best part of you.

... we do not admire what we cannot understand.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.

The cure for loneliness is solitude.

The hands are the heart's messengers.

The heart that gives, gathers.

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

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

There never was a war that was not inward.

Superior people never make long visits.

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

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

Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.

[Marianne Moore's definition of genuine poetry] -- Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

Omissions are not accidents.

... 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.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

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

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

You are not male or female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.

Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.

The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.

Wolf's wool is the best wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves' surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He "gives his opinion and then rests upon it"; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine.

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

I must fight Til I have conquered In myself what causes war

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

I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of fabric is governed by gravity.

[Marianne Moore] once remarked, after a visit to her brother and his family, that the state of being married and having children had one enormous advantage: "One never has to worry about whether one is doing the right thing or not. There isn't time. One is always having to go to the market or drive the children somewhere. There isn't time to wonder 'Is this right or isn't it?

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.

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron, iron is iron till it is rust. There never was a war that was not inward;

When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.

Some days life kicks ye in the arse and all ye wanna do is hang from the trees. ~Marduk If I, like Solomon,... could have my wish- my wish... O to be a dragon... ~Marianne Moore

...when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination" --above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have it.

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather than an asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are justified in supposing that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff and sharp, conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and liking for everything self-dependent, anything an ambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, to attempt through sheer reserve, to confuse presumptions resulting from observation, is idle. You cannot make us think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are brilliant, it is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing of pre-eminence. Would you not, minus thorns, be a what-is-this, a mere perculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew; but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without co-ordination? Guarding the infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re- membered too violently, your thorns are the best part of you.

An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle In The Shape Of A Fish" Here we have thirst and patience, from the first, and art, as in a wave held up for us to see in its essential perpendicularity; Not brittle but intense--the spectrum, that spectacular and humble animal the fish, whose scales turn aside the sun's sword with their polish.

Psychology which explains everything, explains nothing.

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

As the American poet, Marianne Moore, said: "There is a great deal of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.

The cure for loneliness is solitude. —Marianne Moore, from the essay “If I Were Sixteen Today

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?

Nevertheless" you've seen a strawberry that's had a struggle; yet was, where the fragments met, a hedgehog or a star- fish for the multitude of seeds. What better food than apple seeds - the fruit within the fruit - locked in like counter-curved twin hazelnuts? Frost that kills the little rubber-plant - leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can't harm the roots; they still grow in frozen ground. Once where there was a prickley-pear - leaf clinging to a barbed wire, a root shot down to grow in earth two feet below; as carrots from mandrakes or a ram's-horn root some- times. Victory won't come to me unless I go to it; a grape tendril ties a knot in knots till knotted thirty times - so the bound twig that's under- gone and over-gone, can't stir. The weak overcomes its menace, the strong over- comes itself. What is there like fortitude! What sap went through that little thread to make the cherry red!

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.

Who rides on a tiger can never dismount; asleep on an elephant, that is repose.

Blessed the geniuses who know that egomania is not a duty.

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?

Truth is no Apollo Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes. Know that it will be there when it says, "I shall be there when the wave has gone by.

So he who strongly feels, behaves.

Appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.

Durer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this

enjoy

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

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

The Student" “In America,” began the lecturer, “everyone must have a degree. The French do not think that all can have it, they don’t say everyone must go to college.” We incline to feel, here, that although it may be unnecessary to know fifteen languages. one degree is not too much. With us, a school—like the singing tree of which the leaves were mouths that sang in concert— is both a tree of knowledge and of liberty— seen in the unanimity of college mottoes, lux et veritas, Christo et ecclesiae, sapiet felici. It may be that we have not knowledge, just opinions, that we are undergraduates, not students; we know we have been told with smiles, by expatriates of whom we had asked, “When will your experiment be finished?” “Science is never finished.” Secluded from domestic strife, Jack Bookworm led a college life, says Goldsmith; and here also as in France or Oxford, study is beset with dangers—with bookworms, mildews, and complaisancies. But someone in New England has known enough to say that the student is patience personified, a variety of hero, “patient of neglect and of reproach,"—who can "hold by himself.” You can’t beat hens to make them lay. Wolf’s wool is the best of wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves’ surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He “gives him opinion and then rests upon it”; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much.

A man grows up when he looks back, realizes what has happened to him, accepts it all, and begins to change himself. He cannot grow up until he reaches this moment and passes it. We are now at the end of our extraordinarily prolonged adolescence. A very great poet, an American, Miss Marianne Moore, wrote, many years ago, the following description of our terrors: "The weak overcomes its menace. The strong overcomes itself.

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.")

There may even be a real relation between certain kinds of effectiveness in literature and totalitarianism in politics. But although the fictions are alike ways of finding out about the human world, anti-Semitism is a fiction of escape which tells you nothing about death but projects it onto others; whereas King Lear is a fiction that inescapably involves an encounter with oneself, and the image of one's end. This is one difference; and there is another. We have to distinguish between myths and fictions. Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive. In this sense anti-Semitism is a degenerate fiction, a myth; and Lear is a fiction. Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent. Myths make sense in terms of a lost order of time, illud tempus as Eliade calls it; fictions, if successful, make sense of the here and now, hoc tempus. It may be that treating literary fictions as myths sounds good just now, but as Marianne Moore so rightly said of poems, 'these things are important not because a / high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are / useful.

Like strangler figs choking a banyan, not an explorer, no imperialist, not one of us, in taking what we pleased—in colonizing as the saying is—has been a synonym for mercy.

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.

the power of relinquishing what one would keep; that is freedom. Become dinosaur- skulled, quilled or salamander-wooled, more ironshod and javelin-dressed than a hedgehog battalion of steel, but be dull. Don’t be envied or armed with a measuring rod.

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.

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.

one must not borrow a long white beard and tie it on and threaten with the scythe of time the casually curious

But don’t give me, if I can’t have the dress, a trip to Greenland, or grim trip to the moon. The moon should come here. Let him make the trip down, spread on my dark floor some dim marvel, and if a success that I stoop to pick up and wear, I could ask nothing more.

Might verse not best confuse itself with fate?

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.

nor are there any ivory tusks like those two horns which when a tiger coughs, are lowered fiercely and convert the fur to harmless rubbish.

Naif hugged herself as she watched the damp stealing in. The island’s ready mists were like the ghosts of the young dead roaming the slopes. Below ground was a maze of tunnels and caves. Some led to the mountain top, while a different set ran along the beach. In one of the latter Ruzalia moored her sleek stingray-styled boat. At this time of day she would be down there, preparing it for her next raid.

I suppose a Hollywood hack pitching this novel would say: Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness. That would give only the crudest suggestion of this miraculous book, which is at once so strong and delicate that music alone comes to mind as a correlative—in Marianne Moore’s line, “Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti,” or more like Michelangeli playing Debussy—powerful chords hammered out amidst the most feathery ornaments.

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.

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

One ventures, commits one's self, and if readers are not pleased, one can perhaps please one's self and earn that slender right to persevere.

TO A GIRAFFE If it is unpermissible, in fact fatal to be personal and undesirable to be literal—detrimental as well if the eye is not innocent-does it mean that one can live only on top leaves that are small reachable only by a beast that is tall?— of which the giraffe is the best example— the unconversational animal. When plagued by the psychological, a creature can be unbearable that could have been irresistible; or to be exact, exceptional since less conversational than some emotionally-tied-in-knots animal. After all consolations of the metaphysical can be profound. In Homer, existence is flawed; transcendence, conditional; “the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual.

In the days of Prismatic Color not in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam was alone; when there was no smoke and color was fine, not with the refinement of early civilization art, but because of its originality; with nothing to modify it but the mist that went up, obliqueness was a variation of the perpendicular, plain to see and to account for: it is no longer that; nor did the blue-red-yellow band of incandescence that was color keep its stripe

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.

TO VICTOR HUGO OF MY CROW PLUTO “Even when the bird is walking we know that it has wings.”—VICTOR HUGO Of: my crow Pluto, the true Plato, azzurronegro green-blue rainbow — Victor Hugo, it is true we know that the crow “has wings,” however pigeon-toe- inturned on grass. We do. (adagio) Vivorosso “corvo,” although con dizionario io parlo Italiano— this pseudo Esperanto which, savio ucello you speak too — my vow and motto (botto e totto) io giuro è questo credo: lucro è peso morto. And so dear crow— gioièllo mio— I have to let you go; a bel bosco generoso, tuttuto vagabondo, s erafino uvaceo Sunto, oltremarino verecondo Plato, addio. (((((Impromptu equivalents for esperanto madinusa (made in U.S.A.) for those who might not resent them. azzurro-negro: blue-black vivorosso: lively con dizionario: with dictionary savio ucello: knowing bird botto e totto: vow and motto io giuro: I swear è questo credo: is this credo lucro è peso morto: profit is a dead weight gioièllo mio: my jewel a bel bosco: to lovely woods tuttuto vagabondo: complete gypsy serafino uvaceo: grape-black seraph sunto: in short verecondo: modest))))

ROSEMARY Beauty and Beauty’s son and rosemary— Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly— born of the sea supposedly, at Christmas each, in company, braids a garland of festivity. Not always rosemary— since the flight to Egypt, blooming differently. With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath, its flowers—white originally— turned blue. The herb of memory, imitating the blue robe of Mary, is not too legendary to flower both as symbol and as pungency. Springing from stones beside the sea, the height of Christ when thirty-three— it feeds on dew and to the bee “hath a dumb language”; is in reality a kind of Christmas-tree.

Sophie has a photograph of Graham with Alexander Calder, Marianne Moore, Herbert Matter, and Marc Chagall, all laughing together in front of one of Calder’s mobiles; it sits tucked into the frame of her mirror at home, a reminder of something. Something bigger. Bigger than delivering Chateau truffle fries to a table before they get soggy, bigger than the next starlet, producer, or director treated like royalty. Bigger even than her upcoming performance. The idea of that room and those friendships hints at some worldly rightness, some intangible hope that Sophie has to believe in. A collective heart that beats as hers, if only nurtured and surrounded by people like her. Or different from her—but open. Connected.

The pulse of intention does not move so that one Can see it, and moral machinery is not labelled, but The future of time is determined by the power of volition.

EDITOR’S NOTES Poetry Diary of Tolstoy; Dutton, p. 84: “Where the boundary between prose and poetry lies, I shall never be able to understand. The question is raised in manuals of style, yet the answer to it lies beyond me. Poetry is verse: prose is not verse. Or else poetry is everything with the exception of business documents and school books.

Injudicious Gardening Fear is Hope

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,

Just like Willoughby when he found Marianne on the moors,” Cady said dreamily, gazing out at the pewter-bellied storm clouds rolling in. “As if. I’m an officer and you have daddy issues,” he pointed out. “We’re solidly in Colonel Brandon company.” “That may the sexiest thing a man has ever said to me.

« 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.

Yalnızlığın çaresi tecrittir. Marianne Moore

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.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence . . . —Marianne Moore

...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 pluralist understands that truth is various and the pragmatist that it is tentative. The pragmatist gains knowledge not by explaining the universe with a single belief system but by seeking exceptions to one's beliefs and keeping an open mind. As in science, experience expands knowledge without ever revealing truth in its entirety.

[The jerboa] survives depravity not by adopting habits of better-known species but by adapting creatively to the unique rigors of its environment. Although Moore's animals do have innately poetic qualities, such as the jerboa's rhythmic leaps, the poems emphasize what she would later identify as her most valuable assets as an artist: persistence and fortitude. Her animal poems are both instructions in the art of survival and acts of survival themselves.

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

The poem presents maternal love as a paradox: monstrous on the one hand and "the only fortress strong enough to trust to" on the other.

... The world's an orphan's home. Shall we never have peace without sorrow? without pleas of the dying for help that won't come? O quiet form upon the dust, I cannot look and yet I must. If these great patient dyings - all these agonies and wound bearings and bloodshed- can teach us how to live, these dyings were not wasted.

In the new era of identity politics, Moore became the wrong kind of woman with whom to identify. Little did Rich and her adherents imagine in the 1970s and '80s that the fatherless Moore had been reared by lesbians and educated by feminists.

It is hardly surprising that the wizened, androgynous, admittedly prudish little lady in the tricorne would come to seem irrelevant, even embarrassing, within the youth culture of the late 1960s and '70s.

I have no sympathy for people who find unpopularity embittering.

I can’t help but think of a line written by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude.

Marianne Moore put it, “The world’s an orphan’s home.

Just as the poet Marianne Moore says that poems are “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” John’s visions and monsters are meant to embody actual beings and events.