98 John Ashbery Quotes on Night, Infinity and Indecision - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous John Ashbery quotes. There are more than 98 quotes in our John Ashbery quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning John Ashbery wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Night, Infinity and Indecision

Will occur as time grows more open about it.

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

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.

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.

Reading Quotes

It’s important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or when the weather is wrong.

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

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.

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

Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.

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

A perfect example of the new republic’s urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.

I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another.

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.

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

Reading Quotes

Silly girls your heads full of boys.

The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.

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.

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

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

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.

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision.

Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko’s art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.

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.

Each servant stamps the reader with a look.

Reading Quotes

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

I don’t want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The winter does what it can for its children.

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

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

Just when I thought there wasn’t room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea –.

Poetry is mostly hunches.

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.

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.

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.

Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!

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

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

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

Ideal reader Quotes

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