John Ciardi Quotes & Sayings

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

Men marry what they need. I marry you. — John Ciardi

You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone — John Ciardi

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

A university is a reading and discussion club. If students knew how to use the library, they wouldn't need the rest of the buildings. The faculty's job, in great part, is to teach students how to use a library in a living way. All a student should really need is access to the library and a place to sleep. — John Ciardi

Fermentation and civilization are inseparable. — John Ciardi

Poetry lies its way to the truth. — John Ciardi

Poetry is man's best means of perceiving most profoundly the action and the consequence of his own emotions. — John Ciardi

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

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

The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn't deserve it, give it to him anyhow. — John Ciardi

Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone. — John Ciardi

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

Let our love be like an arch- two weaknesses leaning together to form one strength. — John Ciardi

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

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

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

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

Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots. — John Ciardi

The classroom should be an entrance into the world, not an escape from it. — John Ciardi

Every game ever invented by mankind, is a way of making things hard for the fun of it! — John Ciardi

A dollar saved is a quarter earned. — John Ciardi

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. — John Ciardi

The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself. — John Ciardi

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

Within a single scene, it seems to be unwise to have access to the inner reflections of more than one character. The reader generally needs a single character as the means of perception, as the character to whom the events are happening, as the character with whom he is to empathize in order to have the events of the writing happen to him. — John Ciardi

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. — John Ciardi

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

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

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

Hell is the denial of the ordinary... — John Ciardi

A man is what he does with his attention and mine is not for sale. — John Ciardi

Written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar. — John Ciardi

There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation. — John Ciardi

You don't have to suffer to be a poet — John Ciardi

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

Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen. — John Ciardi

The public library is the most dangerous place in town — John Ciardi

Nothing goes further toward a man's liberation than the act of surviving his need for character. — John Ciardi

Most Like an Arch This Marriage
Most like an arch - an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.
Most like an arch - two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.
Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is, what's strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss
I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another's sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight. — John Ciardi

You have to fall in love with hanging around words. — John Ciardi

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

He had his choice, and he liked the worst. — John Ciardi

Good writing tends to present evidence rather than judgments. When the evidence is well presented, the reader's judgments will agree with those implicit in the writing. But nothing is more disastrous to the communication between writer and reader than a series of implicit judgments with which the reader cannot agree or which he finds to be simply silly or for which he is given no evidence he can respect. — John Ciardi

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

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

Boys are the cash of war. Whoever said: we're not free spenders- doesn't know our like. — John Ciardi

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse. — John Ciardi

And the time sundials tell
May be minutes and hours. But it may just as well
Be seconds and sparkles, or seasons and flowers.
No, I don't think of time as just minutes and hours.
Time can be heartbeats, or bird songs, or miles,
Or waves on a beach, or ants in their files
(They do move like seconds - just watch their feet go:
Tick-tick-tick, like a clock). You'll learn as you grow
That whatever there is in a garden, the sun
Counts up on its dial. By the time it is done
Our sundial - or someone's - will certainly add
All the good things there are. Yes, and all of the bad.
And if anyone's here for the finish, the sun
Will have told him - by sundial - how well we have done.
How well we have done, or how badly. Alas,
That is a long thought. Let me hope we all pass. — John Ciardi

Boys are the cash of war. — John Ciardi

Spontaneous is what you get after the seventeenth draft. — John Ciardi

The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen. — John Ciardi

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

The day will happen
whether or not you get up — John Ciardi

Early to bed and early to rise probably indicates unskilled labor. — John Ciardi

Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations. — John Ciardi

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

A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race. — John Ciardi

A good question is never answered. — John Ciardi

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