John Ashbery Quotes

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

The ellipse is as aimless as that, Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear In our present. Its flexing is its account, Return to the point of no return.

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

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

Then let yourself love all that you take delight in Accept yourself whole, accept the heritage That shaped you and is passed on from age to age Down to your entity. Remain mysterious; Rather than be pure, accept yourself as numerous.

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

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

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

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

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

I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.

My feeling is that most political poetry is preaching to the choir, and that the people who are going to make the political changes in our lives are not the people who read poetry, unfortunately. Poetry not specifically aimed at political revolution, though, is beneficial in moving people toward that kind of action, as well as other kinds of action. A good poem makes me want to be active on as many fronts as possible.

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

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.

How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you.

So I cradle this average violin that knows Only forgotten showtunes, but argues The possibility of free declamation anchored To a dull refrain.

Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.

I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you?

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?

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

The promise of learning is a delusion.... Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned, that the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint none of us ever graduates from college, for time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.

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.

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

Poetry is mostly hunches.

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

Life is not at all what you might think it to be A simple tale where each thing has its history It's much more than its scuffle and anything goes Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.

I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.

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

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

Alone with our madness and favorite flower We see that there really is nothing left to write about. Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things In the same way, repeating the same things over and over For love to continue and be gradually different.

The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.

And we may be led, then, upward through more Powerful forms of poetry, past columns With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference. Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.

What I like about music is its ability to be convincing, to carry an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of the argument remain unknown quantities.

Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It's sort of the way dreams come to us and the way that we get knowledge from them, through television, old movies, which I watch a lot of. Lines of dialogue suddenly seem to be part of a poem.

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

The evening light was like honey in the trees When you left me and walked to the end of the street Where the sunset abruptly ended. The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself To the fragile forget-me-not flower. You climbed aboard. Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones, Dreams I had, including suicide, Puff out the hot-air balloon now. It is bursting, it is about to burst

We are prisoners of the world's demented sink. The soft enchantments of our years of innocence Are harvested by accredited experience Our fondest memories soon turn to poison And only oblivion remains in season.

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

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

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

A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.

I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another

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

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

I would like to please the reader, and I think that surprise has to be an element of this, and that may necessitate a certain amount of teasing. To shock the reader is something else again. That has to be handled with great care if you're not going to alienate and hurt him, and I'm firmly against that, just as I disapprove of people who dress with that in mind - dye their hair blue and stick safety pins through their noses and so on.

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

I listen to music a great deal. In a way, it's trying to express things that can't be expressed in words. That's something that interests me, too. Even though I use words to express myself, I am trying to, it seems to me, get beyond that.

It never seems to occur to anyone that each reader is different, and that even those who might be said to resemble each other will each bring an individual set of experiences and references to their reading, and interpret and misinterpret it according to these.

And the way Though discontinuous, and intermittent, sometimes Not heard of for years at a time, did, Nonetheless, move up, although, to his surprise It was inside the house, And always getting narrower.