Top 91 Quotes & Sayings by John Ashbery

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision

But always and sometimes questioning the old modes And the new wondering, the poem, growing up through the floor, Standing tall in tubers, invading and smashing the ritual Parlor, demands to be met on its own terms now, Now that the preliminary negotiations are at last over.

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

until only infinity remained of beauty

It is because everything is relative That we shall never see in that sphere of pure wisdom and Entertainment much more than groping shadows of an incomplete Former existence so close it burns like the mouth that Closes down over all your effort like the moment Of death

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

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

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.

If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one's actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.

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

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.

The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness -- that, at least, we may be sure that we have -- and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing.

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.

Some certified nut Will try to tell you it's poetry, (It's extraordinary, it makes a great deal of sense) But watch out or he'll start with some New notion or other.

The winter does what it can for its children.

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

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

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.

The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.

One listens to a piece of great music, say, and feels deeply moved by it, and wants to put this feeling into words, but it can't be put into words. That's what - the music has already supplied the meaning, and words will just be superfluous after that. But it's that kind of verbal meaning that can't be verbalized that I try to get at in poetry.

I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another

Poetry is mostly hunches.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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