Marianne Moore

"Poetry is a magic of pauses ... not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness."

"One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express."

"Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested ... liberate the imagination."

"You know I don't really understand much of my poetry myself. Of course, I was convinced I understood it when I wrote it !"

"I don't consider In Distrust of Merits a poem. It's just a burst of feelings. It's emotion recorded, a 'haphazard form ' a protest."

"I think books are chiefly responsible for my dogged self determined efforts to write; books & verisimilitude; I like to describe things."

"For me, a poem starts when a felicitious phrase springs to mind."

"I never plan a stanza, words cluster like chromosomes determining the procedure, later, I may influence or thin it."

"What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it."

"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 have been influenced by the Bible, Bach's music and contemporarily by Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hopkins."

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

"Omissions are not accidents."

"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."

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

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

"He fights and he writes. Is there something I have missed? He is a smiling pugilist."

"I have learned more from Ezra Pound about writing than from anyone else."

"Music should be directed by the ear, poetry by the imagination"

"There is an inevitable connection between music and poetry."

"I tend to write in patterned arrangement with rhymes.. I try to secure an effect of flowing continuity and the correspondence between verse and music."

"I look upon verse as an exercise in composition."

"Whatever it is.. poem.. play, story..it must hold attention."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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?"

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

"You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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 ..."

"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."

"What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe."

"Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time."

"Some speak of things we know, as new; And you, of things unknown as things forgot."

"We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave."

"What of it? We call them brave perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come when no one will fight for anything and there's nothing of worth to save."

"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."

"A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague."

"Staff and effigy of the animal which by shedding its skin is a sign of renewal — the symbol of medicine."