John Ashbery Quotes
Collection of top 59 famous quotes about John Ashbery
John Ashbery Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational John Ashbery quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
— John Ashbery
You have to try to imagine an ideal reader, who's neither stupid nor able to know what your thoughts are.
— John Ashbery
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
— John Ashbery
As if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.
— John Ashbery
I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.
— John Ashbery
The music brought us what it seemed / We had long desired, but in a form / so rarefied there was no emptiness of sensation
— John Ashbery
It was always November there.
— John Ashbery
Poetry is mostly hunches.
— John Ashbery
I could have made a casserole out of these things, but you always say you like to know what you're eating.
— John Ashbery
It is written in the Book of Usable MinutesThat all things have their center in their dying ... — John Ashbery
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
— John Ashbery
I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer's caveWhere I can fashion eclogues that are chaste and grave. — John Ashbery
Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity.
— John Ashbery
Just when I thought there wasn't room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea - — John Ashbery
The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how ...
— John Ashbery
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.
— John Ashbery
The sun fades like the spreadingOf a peacock's tail, as though twilight
Might be read as a warning to those desperate
For easy solutions. — John Ashbery
Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.
— John Ashbery
Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.
— John Ashbery
Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
— John Ashbery
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense. — John Ashbery
The winter does what it can for its children.
— John Ashbery
The soul is not a soul,Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention. — John Ashbery
A little bunny or some kind of ferret was probably
there too, and bore witness as only rodents can. — John Ashbery
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
— John Ashbery
I'm heading for a clean-named placelike Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get there
without help and nosy proclivities. — John Ashbery
I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
— John Ashbery
The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?
— John Ashbery
Silly girls your heads full of boys
— John Ashbery
You stupefied me. We waxed,Carnivores, late and alight
In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous. — John Ashbery
I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another
— John Ashbery
A yak is a prehistoric cabbage; of that, we can be sure.
— John Ashbery
Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
— John Ashbery
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.
— John Ashbery
Each servant stamps the reader with a look.
— John Ashbery
Darkness fell like a wet sponge.
— John Ashbery
Leaves around the door are penciled losses.
— John Ashbery
Life is beautiful. He who reads thatAs in the window of some distant, speeding train
Knows what he wants, and what will befall. — John Ashbery
Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.
— John Ashbery
until only infinity remained of beauty
— John Ashbery
Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko's art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.
— John Ashbery
This whole moment is the groinOf a borborygmic giant who even now
Is rolling over on us in his sleep. — John Ashbery
Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us. — John Ashbery
To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhapsTo some reader a latticework of regrets ... — John Ashbery
Transgress. In a word, be other than yourself in turning into your love-soaked opposite.
— John Ashbery
In the increasingly convincing darknessThe words become palpable, like a fruit
That is too beautiful to eat. — John Ashbery
Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
— John Ashbery