Marianne Moore quotes - page 3

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. (Marianne Moore)
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. View quote
Marianne Moore
Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence. View quote
Marianne Moore
For me, a poem starts when a felicitious phrase springs to mind. View quote
Marianne Moore
... we do not admire what we cannot understand. View quote
Marianne Moore
If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze. View quote
Marianne Moore
I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it. View quote
Marianne Moore
Poetry is a magic of pauses ... not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness. View quote
Marianne Moore
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. View quote
Marianne Moore
If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try. View quote
Marianne Moore
It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing. (Marianne Moore)
There never was a war that was not inward. View quote
Marianne Moore
Poetry is all nouns and verbs. View quote
Marianne Moore
We are suffering from too much sarcasm. View quote
Marianne Moore
If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist. View quote
Marianne Moore
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it. View quote
Marianne Moore
Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt. View quote
Marianne Moore
In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity. View quote
Marianne Moore
You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief. View quote
Marianne Moore
Poetry 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. View quote
Marianne Moore
Hebrew poetry is, prose with a sort of heightened consciousness' Ecstasy affords the occasion expediency, determines the form. (Marianne Moore)
He's not out seeing a sight but the rock crystal thing to see - the startling El Greco brimming with inner light - that covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know as the hero. View quote
Marianne Moore
Some speak of things we know, as new; And you, of things unknown as things forgot. View quote
Marianne Moore
Staff and effigy of the animal which by shedding its skin is a sign of renewal - the symbol of medicine. View quote
Marianne Moore
Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity. View quote
Marianne Moore