John Ashbery Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Until, accustomed to disappointments, you can let yourself rule and be ruled by these strings or emanations that connect everything together, you haven't fully exorcised the demon of doubt that sets you in motion like a rocking horse that cannot stop rocking.

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

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

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

Therefore bivouac we On this great, blond highway, unimpeded by Veiled scruples, worn conundrums. Morning is Impermanent. Grab sex things, swing up Over the horizon like a boy On a fishing expedition.

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

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

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.

And just as there are no words for the surface, that is, No words to say what it really is, that it is not Superficial but a visible core, then there is No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.

... the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon.

Extreme patience and persistence are required, Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life.

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.

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

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

Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse. Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.

We might realize that the present moment may be one of an eternal or sempiternal series of moments, all of which will resemble it because, in some ways, they are the present, and won't in other ways, because the present will be the past by that time.

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

How funny your name would be if you could follow it back to where the first person thought of saying it, naming himself that, or maybe some other persons thought of it and named that person. It would be like following a river to its source, which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Silly girls your heads full of boys