John Ashbery Quotes & Sayings

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. — John Ashbery

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

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

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

Each servant stamps the reader with a look. — John Ashbery

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

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

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

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

It was always November there. — John Ashbery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transgress. In a word, be other than yourself in turning into your love-soaked opposite. — John Ashbery

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

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

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

I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer's cave
Where I can fashion eclogues that are chaste and grave. — John Ashbery

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

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

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

Myrtle


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.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please, and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at long last to impersonate that river,
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here. — John Ashbery

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

I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another — John Ashbery

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject! — John Ashbery

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

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

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

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

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

Try a little subtlety in self-defense; it'll help, you'll find out. — John Ashbery

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

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

So one can lose a good idea
by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides
it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations
are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does
recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier. — John Ashbery

I could have made a casserole out of these things, but you always say you like to know what you're eating. — John Ashbery

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

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

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

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

At North Farm"

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?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings? — John Ashbery

Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,
A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us. — John Ashbery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little
bunny or some kind of ferret was probably
there too, and bore witness as only rodents can. — John Ashbery

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

Where then shall hope and fear their objects find? — John Ashbery

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

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

Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step Into disorder this one meant. Don't you see It's all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial has been set And that's ominous, but all your graciousness in living Conspires with it, now that this is our home: A place to be from, and have people ask about. — John Ashbery

until only infinity remained of beauty — John Ashbery

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

Late Echo"

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.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day. — John Ashbery

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

Darkness fell like a wet sponge. — John Ashbery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows. — John Ashbery

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

It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes
That all things have their center in their dying ... — John Ashbery

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

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

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

Silly girls your heads full of boys — John Ashbery

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

You stupefied me. We waxed,
Carnivores, late and alight
In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous. — John Ashbery

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

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 — John Ashbery

Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity. — John Ashbery

Just Walking Around"

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is no name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,
An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,
Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again
That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near
The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other. — John Ashbery

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. — John Ashbery

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

Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense. — John Ashbery

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

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

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

Leaves around the door are penciled losses. — John Ashbery

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

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

You have to try to imagine an ideal reader, who's neither stupid nor able to know what your thoughts are. — John Ashbery

The winter does what it can for its children. — John Ashbery

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

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

This Room
The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here. — John Ashbery

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