John Ciardi Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

The thing about cats, as you may find, Is that no one knows what they have in mind.

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.

Boys are the cash of war.

Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations.

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.

Every parent is at some time the father of the unreturned prodigal, with nothing to do but keep his house open to hope.

General rules have been legislated into being by past masters.

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

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.

Fermentation equals civilization.

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.

A dollar saved is a quarter earned.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their conviction. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their convictions.

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.

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

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

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.

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.