John Ashbery quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Ashbery

John Ashbery Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Ashbery on Wise Famous Quotes.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.

You have to try to imagine an ideal reader, who's neither stupid nor able to know what your thoughts are.

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision

As if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.

The music brought us what it seemed / We had long desired, but in a form / so rarefied there was no emptiness of sensation

It was always November there.

Poetry is mostly hunches.

Expecting rain, the profile of a day
Wears its soul like a hat ...

I could have made a casserole out of these things, but you always say you like to know what you're eating.

It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes
That all things have their center in their dying ...

The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes

I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer's cave
Where I can fashion eclogues that are chaste and grave.

Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity.

And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.

Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea -

The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how ...

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

The sun fades like the spreading
Of a peacock's tail, as though twilight
Might be read as a warning to those desperate
For easy solutions.

I am often asked why I write, and I don't know really
I just want to.

I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.

Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.

Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!

Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

The winter does what it can for its children.

Try a little subtlety in self-defense; it'll help, you'll find out.

The soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

Walter Pater said that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, but I've always felt that music aspires to the condition of words.

A little
bunny or some kind of ferret was probably
there too, and bore witness as only rodents can.

All beauty, resonance, integrity,
Exist by deprivation or logic
Of strange position.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

I'm heading for a clean-named place
like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get there
without help and nosy proclivities.

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.

The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?

I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.

Silly girls your heads full of boys

You stupefied me. We waxed,
Carnivores, late and alight
In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.

I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another

In the evening
Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.

A yak is a prehistoric cabbage; of that, we can be sure.

Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?

We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of / isolated instants / So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.

Each servant stamps the reader with a look.

Darkness fell like a wet sponge.

Leaves around the door are penciled losses.

Life is beautiful. He who reads that
As in the window of some distant, speeding train
Knows what he wants, and what will befall.

Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.

until only infinity remained of beauty

Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko's art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.

This whole moment is the groin
Of a borborygmic giant who even now
Is rolling over on us in his sleep.

Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,
A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.

Once you've lived in France, you don't want to live anywhere else, including France.

To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps
To some reader a latticework of regrets ...

Transgress. In a word, be other than yourself in turning into your love-soaked opposite.

In the increasingly convincing darkness
The words become palpable, like a fruit
That is too beautiful to eat.

The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through ...

Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.