John Ashbery Quotes

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

The Recent Past

Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination.
As today the sky 70 degrees above zero with lines falling
The way September moves a lace curtain to be near a pear,
The oddest device can't be usual. And that is where
The pejorative sense of fear moves axles. In the stars
There is no longer any peace, emptied like a cup of coffee
Between the blinding rain that interviews.

You were my quintuplets when I decided to leave you
Opening a picture book the pictures were all of grass
Slowly the book was on fire, you the reader
Sitting with specs full of smoke exclaimed
How it was a rhyme for "brick" or "redder."
The next chapter told all about a brook.
You were beginning to see the relation when a tidal wave
Arrived with sinking ships that spelled out "Aladdin."
I thought about the Arab boy in his cave
But the thoughts came faster than advice.
If you knew that snow was a still toboggan in space
The print could rhyme with "fallen star. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

An Additional Poem

Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
The harbor cold to the mating ships,
And you have lost as you stand by the balcony
With the forest of the sea calm and gray beneath.
A strong impression torn from the descending light
But night is guilty. You knew the shadow
In the trunk was raving
But as you keep growing hungry you forget.
The distant box is open. A sound of grain
Poured over the floor in some eagerness--we
Rise with the night let out of the box of wind. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

A Blessing in Disguise

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,
But I, in my soul, am alive too.
I feel I must sing and dance, to tell
Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

And I sing amid despair and isolation
Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are you. You see,
You hold me up to the light in a way

I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps
Because you always tell me I am you,
And right. The great spruces loom.
I am yours to die with, to desire.

I cannot ever think of me, I desire you
For a room in which the chairs ever
Have their backs turned to the light
Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees

That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.
If the wild light of this January day is true
I pledge me to be truthful unto you
Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.

Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into
the day
On the wings of the secret you will never know.
Taking me from myself, in the path
Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.

I prefer "you" in the plural, I want "you,"
You must come to me, all golden and pale
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation. ~ 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

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

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

The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how ... ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaves around the door are penciled losses. ~ John Ashbery

It's important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or when the weather is wrong. ~ John Ashbery

When John Ashbery was asked where he turned for consolation, he replied, "Probably to a movie, something with Barbara Stanwyck." - Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2007 ~ Victoria Wilson

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

The horses
Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,
"I'm a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me ~ 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

This whole moment is the groin
Of a borborygmic giant who even now
Is rolling over on us in his sleep. ~ John Ashbery

The Unknown Travelers

Lugged to the gray arbor,
I have climbed this snow-stone on my face,
My stick, but what, snapped the avalanche
The air filled with slowly falling rocks

Breathed in deeply--arrived,
The white room, a table covered
With a towel, mug of ice--fear
Among the legs of a chair, the ashman,
Purple and gray she starts upright in her chair. ~ 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

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

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

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

Saying It To Keep It From Happening"


Some departure from the norm
Will occur as time grows more open about it.
The consensus gradually changed; nobody
Lies about it any more. Rust dark pouring
Over the body, changing it without decay -
People with too many things on their minds, but we live
In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,
Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness
And the other livers of it get off at the same stop.
How careless. Yet in the end each of us
Is seen to have traveled the same distance - it's time
That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,
Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it
were
The same as making it happen. You're not sorry,
Of course, especially if this was the way it had to happen,
Yet would like an exacter share, something about time
That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it
means.
It is a long field, and we know only the far end of it,
Not the part we presumably had to go through to get there.
If it isn't enough, take the idea
Inherent in the day, armloads of wheat and flowers
Lying around flat on handtrucks, if maybe it means more
In pertaining to you, yet what is is what happens in the end
As though you cared. The event combined with
Beams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the
wiser
Usages of ag ~ 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

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

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

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'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

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

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

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

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject! ~ John Ashbery

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

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

Silly girls your heads full of boys ~ 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 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

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

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

until only infinity remained of beauty ~ John Ashbery

Where then shall hope and fear their objects find? ~ 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

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

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

It is the lumps and trials
That tell us whether we shall be known
And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star. ~ 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

I would like to please the reader, and I think that surprise has to be an element of this, and that may necessitate a certain amount of teasing. To shock the reader is something else again. That has to be handled with great care if you're not going to alienate and hurt him, and I'm firmly against that, just as I disapprove of people who dress with that in mind
dye their hair blue and stick safety pins through their noses and so on. ~ John Ashbery

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

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

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision ~ John Ashbery

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

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

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

Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen. ~ John Ashbery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She loved so much mysteries that she became one ~ John Green

The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked. ~ John Clellon Holmes

It will be celebrated ... with pomp and parade ... bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other. ~ John Adams

Life is a short walk. There is so little time and so much living to achieve. ~ John Oliver Killens

The logic of the Bible says: Act according to God's "will of command," not according to his "will of decree." God's "will of decree" is whatever comes to pass. "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that" (James 4:15). God's "will of decree" ordained that his Son be betrayed (Luke 22:22), ridiculed (Isaiah 53:3), mocked (Luke 18:32), flogged (Matthew 20:19), forsaken (Matthew 26:31), pierced (John 19:37), and killed (Mark 9:31). But the Bible teaches us plainly that we should not betray, ridicule, mock, flog, forsake, pierce, or kill innocent people. That is God's "will of command." We do not look at the death of Jesus, clearly willed by God, and conclude that killing Jesus is good and that we should join the mockers. ~ John Piper

What do they expect of a one-eyed, one-armed artist-- and the son of Garp? No flaws? ~ John Irving

It is not what you eat, but what you digest,that makes you strong. It is not what you can earn, but what you save, that makes you rich - it is not what you learn, but what you remember, that makes you wise. ~ John Harold Swan

I never thought of myself as being handsome or good-looking or whatever. ~ Elton John

From early childhood I had always dreamed of becoming an explorer. Somehow I had acquired the impression that an explorer was someone who lived in the jungle with natives and lots of wild animals, and I couldn't imagine anything better than that! Unlike other little boys, most of whom changed their minds about what they want to be several times as they grew older, I never wavered from this ambition. ~ John Goddard

I think that all writers feel alienated ... I know that I do ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated. ~ John Le Carre

You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life. ~ John Updike

In John 10, learned Jews in the Temple challenge Jesus about his identity as Christ. Jesus says that he and the Father are one, a clear claim of deity in the Hebrew culture, which results in the Jews picking up stones to stone him because he, being a man, made himself out to be God (10:33). Their particular Rabbinic absolute monotheism did not allow for the existence of divinity other than the Father. Jesus responds by appealing to this very passage we are discussing: "Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your Law, 'I said, you are gods'? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came - and Scripture cannot be broken - do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God'?" (10:34-36). ~ Brian Godawa

Dentists encourage us to use dental floss daily to promote the health of our teeth; we need to use mental floss to get rid of old thinking and promote the health of our leadership. ~ John C. Maxwell

If I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries. ~ John Stuart Mill