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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Poetry is mostly hunches.

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.

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

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.

The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.

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

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

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 lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another

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

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.

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

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision

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

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.

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

Each servant stamps the reader with a look.

... 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.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!

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

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

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

until only infinity remained of beauty

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.

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

Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.