John Ashbery Quotes

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

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.

Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.

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

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?

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

Each servant stamps the reader with a look.

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

Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Will occur as time grows more open about it.

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

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The winter does what it can for its children.

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.

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

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision

until only infinity remained of beauty

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.

Poetry is mostly hunches.

Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.

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

... 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.

Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole Like some pocket history of the world, so general As to constitute a sob or wail

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.

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 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.

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

I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.

I'm heading for a clean-named place like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get there without help and nosy proclivities.

Silly girls your heads full of boys

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

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.

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