Top 100 Ashbery Quotes
#1. Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living. The night is cold and delicate and full of angels Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up, The chime goes unheard. We are together at last, though far apart. - from "The Ecclesiast" by John Ashbery
Philip Pullman
#2. The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
Robert Morgan
#3. 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.
John Ashbery
#4. 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.
John Ashbery
#5. The mind Is so hospitable, taking in everything Like boarders, and you don't see until It's all over how little there was to learn Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated.
John Ashbery
#6. 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.
John Ashbery
#7. 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.
John Ashbery
#8. 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.
John Ashbery
#9. I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
John Ashbery
#10. 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.
John Ashbery
#11. The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through ...
John Ashbery
#12. My poetry is often criticized for a failure to communicate, but I take issue with this; my intention is to communicate and my feeling is that a poem that communicates something that's already known by the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect for him.
John Ashbery
#14. Life is beautiful. He who reads that
As in the window of some distant, speeding train
Knows what he wants, and what will befall.
John Ashbery
#15. I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.
John Ashbery
#16. 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
John Ashbery
#17. 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?
John Ashbery
#18. Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
John Ashbery
#19. There are good times in everybody's satchel, nor do we all get a free pass. That would be a split decision, as they call it. How else is the planned brotherhood to float forward?
John Ashbery
#20. 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.
John Ashbery
#21. 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.
John Ashbery
#22. The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?
John Ashbery
#23. 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.
John Ashbery
#24. This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.
Alas, the summer's energy wanes quickly,
A moment and it is gone. And no longer
May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.
Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.
John Ashbery
#25. It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes
That all things have their center in their dying ...
John Ashbery
#26. As if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.
John Ashbery
#27. 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.
John Ashbery
#28. A little
bunny or some kind of ferret was probably
there too, and bore witness as only rodents can.
John Ashbery
#29. I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.
John Ashbery
#30. 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.
John Ashbery
#31. Some day we will try
To do as many things as are possible
And perhaps we shall succeed at a handful
Of them, but this will not have anything
To do with what is promised today, our
Landscape sweeping out from us to disappear
On the horizon.
John Ashbery
#32. You stupefied me. We waxed,
Carnivores, late and alight
In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
John Ashbery
#33. And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.
John Ashbery
#34. 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.
John Ashbery
#35. In the increasingly convincing darkness
The words become palpable, like a fruit
That is too beautiful to eat.
John Ashbery
#36. All beauty, resonance, integrity,
Exist by deprivation or logic
Of strange position.
John Ashbery
#37. We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of / isolated instants / So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.
John Ashbery
#38. Expecting rain, the profile of a day
Wears its soul like a hat ...
John Ashbery
#39. 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.
John Ashbery
#40. Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.
John Ashbery
#41. 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 ...
John Ashbery
#42. 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.
John Ashbery
#43. So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain ...
John Ashbery
#44. Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
John Ashbery
#45. It was all as it had been,
except for the weight of the present,
that scuttled the pact we made with heaven.
In truth there was no cause for rejoicing,
nor need to turn around, either.
We were lost just by standing,
listening to the hum of wires overhead.
John Ashbery
#46. 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.
John Ashbery
#47. Each servant stamps the reader with a look.
John Ashbery
#49. 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
John Ashbery
#50. You bad birds,
But God shall not punish you, you
Shall be with us in heaven, though less
Conscious of your happiness, perhaps, than we.
Hell is a not quite satisfactory heaven, probably,
But you are the fruit and jewels
Of my arrangement ...
John Ashbery
#51. I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
John Ashbery
#52. The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
John Ashbery
#53. I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer's cave
Where I can fashion eclogues that are chaste and grave.
John Ashbery
#54. 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.
John Ashbery
#55. I could have made a casserole out of these things, but you always say you like to know what you're eating.
John Ashbery
#56. 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.
John Ashbery
#57. Leaves around the door are penciled losses.
John Ashbery
#58. 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.
John Ashbery
#59. Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.
John Ashbery
#60. But it is the same thing we are all seeing,
Our world. Go after it,
Go get it boy, says the man holding the stick.
Eat, says the hunger, and we plunge blindly in again,
Into the chamber behind the thought
John Ashbery
#61. Extreme patience and persistence are required,
Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed
The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life.
John Ashbery
#62. I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.
John Ashbery
#63. I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another
John Ashbery
#64. A yak is a prehistoric cabbage; of that, we can be sure.
John Ashbery
#65. This whole moment is the groin
Of a borborygmic giant who even now
Is rolling over on us in his sleep.
John Ashbery
#66. 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.
John Ashbery
#67. The genius of Cornell is that he sees and enables us to see with the eyes of childhood, before our vision got clouded by experience, when objects like a rubber ball or a pocket mirror seemed charged with meaning, and a marble rolling across a wooden floor could be as portentous as a passing comet.
John Ashbery
#69. Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea -
John Ashbery
#70. Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.
John Ashbery
#71. Transgress. In a word, be other than yourself in turning into your love-soaked opposite.
John Ashbery
#72. 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.
John Ashbery
#73. Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko's art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.
John Ashbery
#74. The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
John Ashbery
#75. 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.
John Ashbery
#77. The music brought us what it seemed / We had long desired, but in a form / so rarefied there was no emptiness of sensation
John Ashbery
#78. Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
John Ashbery
#79. I am often asked why I write, and I don't know really
I just want to.
John Ashbery
#80. Walter Pater said that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, but I've always felt that music aspires to the condition of words.
John Ashbery
#81. The winter does what it can for its children.
John Ashbery
#82. Once you've lived in France, you don't want to live anywhere else, including France.
John Ashbery
#83. 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.
John Ashbery
#85. The soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
John Ashbery
#86. The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how ...
John Ashbery
#87. To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps
To some reader a latticework of regrets ...
John Ashbery
#88. 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.
John Ashbery
#89. The facts of history have been too well rehearsed (I'm speaking needless to say not of written history but the oral kind that goes on in you without your having to do anything about it) ...
John Ashbery
#90. Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
John Ashbery
#91. 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.
John Ashbery
#92. 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.
John Ashbery
#93. 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.
John Ashbery
#94. Try a little subtlety in self-defense; it'll help, you'll find out.
John Ashbery
#95. Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
John Ashbery
#96. In the evening
Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.
John Ashbery
#97. You have to try to imagine an ideal reader, who's neither stupid nor able to know what your thoughts are.
John Ashbery
#98. Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,
A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
John Ashbery
#99. There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
John Ashbery
#100. Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity.
John Ashbery
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