A Quote by John Ashbery

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. — © John Ashbery
I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
You can't drive a Spike with a Tack Hammer
The song 'If I Had a Hammer' is geared toward people who don't have a hammer. Maybe before I had a hammer I thought I'd hammer in the morning and hammer in the evening. But once you get a hammer, you find you don't really hammer as much as you thought you would.
Personally, I think government is a tool, like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build or you can use a hammer to destroy; there is nothing intrinsically good or evil about the hammer itself. It is the purposes to which it is put and the skill with which it is used that determine whether the hammer's work is good or bad.
I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going.
I look for places like me: big, hollow, forgotten by most everyone.
There was a band in Australia named Midnight Oil, and they were a very, very political, and they literally hit you over the head with a hammer. U2 sometimes can hit you over the head with a rubber hammer.
The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.
Getting angry over something that won't change is like seeing what happens if you hit your hand with a hammer over and over again, and being surprised each time when it hurts. So you might as well stop doing it.
I want girls to feel that they can be sassy and full and weird and geeky and smart and independent, and not so withered and shriveled. (The American Apparel ads) I'm over this weird, exhausted girl. I'm over the girl that's tired and freezing and hungry. I like bossy girls. I like people filled with life. I'm over this weird media thing with all this, like, hollow-eyed, empty, party crap.
Imagine this guy hits Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger and knocks him out. You hit Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger, he'll beat the crap out of you.
my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely.
Far over the Misty Mountains cold, To dungeons deep and caverns old, We must away, ere break of day, To seek our pale enchanted gold. The dwarves of yore made mighty spells, While hammers fell like ringing bells, In places deep, where dark things sleep, In hollow halls beneath the fells. The pines were roaring on the heights, The wind was moaning in the night, The fire was red, it flaming spread, The trees like torches blazed with light.
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
Propaganda is a weapon that the Confederacy wields best, and wields heaviest. It is their hammer. And when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.
When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails. But nations without great military power face the opposite danger: When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like nails.
Steve Bannon was my right-hand man for, like, seven years. He's a hammer. And when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. He's very sure and very smart. Very driven, very patriotic. He's not most of the things that people say.
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