Top 56 Ciardi Quotes
#1. The promising young poets, the hopefuls? I'd name Richard Wilbur, Peter Viereck, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ciardi...Leonard Bacon...but it is still too early to assertions. They're all 'in the field.' It remains to be seen how many will cross the finish line.
Robert Frost
#2. Life is a " vale of tears" a period of trial and suffering, an unpleasant but necessary preparation for the afterlife where alone man could expect to enjoy happiness - Archibald T. MacAllister (The Inferno; Dante Alighieri translated by John Ciardi)
Dante Alighieri
#3. You have to fall in love with hanging around words.
John Ciardi
#4. Spontaneous is what you get after the seventeenth draft.
John Ciardi
#5. Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens to let us in.
John Ciardi
#6. The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn't deserve it, give it to him anyhow.
John Ciardi
#8. Every parent is at some time the father of the unreturned prodigal, with nothing to do but keep his house open to hope.
John Ciardi
#9. A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
John Ciardi
#10. A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.
John Ciardi
#11. Few pay attention to the histories and the root pictures words can release. These neglected qualities are there, however, and the poets have always found them a self-delighting source of excitement.
John Ciardi
#12. Written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar.
John Ciardi
#13. Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations.
John Ciardi
#14. There was a young lady from Gloucester
Who complained that her parents both bossed her,
So she ran off to Maine.
Did her parents complain?
Not at all
they were glad to have lost her.
John Ciardi
#15. It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their confusions.
John Ciardi
#16. A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.
John Ciardi
#17. The day will happen
whether or not you get up
John Ciardi
#18. One night I dreamed I was locked in my Father's watch
With Ptolemy and twenty-one ruby stars
Mounted on spheres and the Primum Mobile
Coiled and gleaming to the end of space
And the notched spheres eating each other's rinds
To the last tooth of time, and the case closed.
John Ciardi
#19. Who could believe an ant in theory? A giraffe in blueprint? Ten thousand doctors of what's possible Could reason half the jungle out of being.
John Ciardi
#20. Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.
John Ciardi
#21. Poetry is man's best means of perceiving most profoundly the action and the consequence of his own emotions.
John Ciardi
#22. If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.
John Ciardi
#23. Nothing goes further toward a man's liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.
John Ciardi
#25. I have one head that wants to be good, And one that wants to be bad. And always, as soon as I get up, One of my heads is sad.
John Ciardi
#26. I once knew a word I forget
That mean "I am sorry we met
And I wish you the same."
It sounds like your name
But I haven't remember that yet.
John Ciardi
#28. Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
John Ciardi
#29. Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots.
John Ciardi
#30. Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.
John Ciardi
#32. To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.
John Ciardi
#33. Early to bed and early to rise probably indicates unskilled labor.
John Ciardi
#34. The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
John Ciardi
#35. The classroom should be an entrance into the world, not an escape from it.
John Ciardi
#36. A carbonated wine foisted upon Americans (who else would drink it?) by winery ad agencies as a way of getting rid of inferior champagne by mixing it with inferior burgundy.
John Ciardi
#37. Every game ever invented by mankind, is a way of making things hard for the fun of it!
John Ciardi
#38. The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.
John Ciardi
#39. Conviction is possible only in a world more primitive than ours can be perceived to be. A man can achieve a simply gnomic conviction only by ignoring the radical describers of his environment, or by hating them, as convinced men have hated, say, Darwin and Freud, as agents of some devil.
John Ciardi
#40. There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.
John Ciardi
#41. He had his choice, and he liked the worst.
John Ciardi
#43. Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.
John Ciardi
#44. Boys are the cash of war. Whoever said: we're not free spenders- doesn't know our like.
John Ciardi
#45. Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen.
John Ciardi
#46. Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.
John Ciardi
#47. Men marry what they need. I marry you.
John Ciardi
#48. Let our love be like an arch- two weaknesses leaning together to form one strength.
John Ciardi
#49. What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.
John Ciardi
#50. You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone
John Ciardi
#51. I'm smiled out, talked out, quipped out, socialized so far from any being, I need the weight of mortal silences to get realized back into myself.
John Ciardi
#52. A man is what he does with his attention and mine is not for sale.
John Ciardi
#53. At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected, I shall forgive last the delicately wounded who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never got up again, neither to fight back, nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration.
John Ciardi
#55. A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.
John Ciardi
#56. The public library is the most dangerous place in town
John Ciardi
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