John Ashbery Quotes

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.

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

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

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

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.

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

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

until only infinity remained of beauty

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.

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?

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

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

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

The soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

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

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?

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.

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

Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It's sort of the way dreams come to us and the way that we get knowledge from them, through television, old movies, which I watch a lot of. Lines of dialogue suddenly seem to be part of a poem.

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

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.

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

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.

So I cradle this average violin that knows Only forgotten showtunes, but argues The possibility of free declamation anchored To a dull refrain.

Life is beautiful. He who reads that As in the window of some distant, speeding train Knows what he wants, and what will befall.