Life & Wisdom Quote by Marianne Moore

Impatience usually gets filed under moral failure: a lack of discipline, a childish need for the world to hurry up. Marianne Moore flips that reflex on its head and, in doing so, defends a distinctly modern kind of selfhood. If you are truly “in bondage,” you learn the rhythms of waiting. You accommodate. You become fluent in delay because delay is part of the system keeping you in place. Impatience, by contrast, is the nervous energy of someone who believes their time is theirs to spend. It’s not petulance; it’s a refusal to internalize the schedule of your superiors.

Moore’s phrasing is surgical. “Mark” suggests evidence, a tell, almost a bruise you can’t hide. “Independence” isn’t romantic freedom; it’s a stance, a self-authorizing posture. The subtext is that obedience often masquerades as virtue. Patience can be wisdom, yes, but it can also be training - the polished etiquette of the powerless. Moore, a poet famous for restraint and meticulous observation, uses restraint here to smuggle in a provocation: the most “proper” people may be the most thoroughly managed.

In Moore’s early-20th-century context - an era of tightening social codes, industrial time, and women negotiating public and private authority - impatience reads as a small insurrection. It’s the psychological signal that you expect responsiveness from the world, that you assume your desires deserve traction. That assumption is what bondage tries to extinguish.