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

Marianne Moore Literature See all quotes by Marianne Moore →

React to this quote

More by Marianne Moore

“Music should be directed by the ear, poetry by the imagination”

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

“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 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.”

“Modern American Poetry: Marianne Moore”

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

Resonant Thoughts

"It seems to us that in intelligence there is a fundamental faculty, the alteration or the lack of which, is of the utmost importance for practical life. This faculty is judgment, otherwise called good…"

— Alfred Binet

Psychology1857–1911

#mind

"Congress imposed a warrant requirement in 1978 which JFK didn’t use when he went after the Klan. He put the Klan out of business, but he didn’t do it with -- by going through the courts. He did it by …"

— Mark Riebling

Literature1963

#mind

"I’d like the power to make things die with the power of my mind. Not because I have any specific use in mind for it; I just think it’d be useful to have for difficult social situations. Like, if you’r…"

— Ben Croshaw

Journalism1983

#mind

"The overarching ideas that have influenced my work and fueled my interest in conscious and unconscious memory derive from a perspective on mind that psychiatry and psychoanalysis opened up for me."

— Eric Kandel

Medicine1929

#mind