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John Ashbery Inspirational Quotes (48)

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You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
John Ashbery
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Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.
John Ashbery
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Silly girls your heads full of boys
John Ashbery
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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
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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
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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
John Ashbery
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... 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
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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
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The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
John Ashbery
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I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
John Ashbery
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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
John Ashbery
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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
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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
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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
John Ashbery
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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
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Therefore bivouac we On this great, blond highway, unimpeded by Veiled scruples, worn conundrums. Morning is Impermanent. Grab sex things, swing up Over the horizon like a boy On a fishing expedition.
John Ashbery
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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
John Ashbery
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Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.
John Ashbery
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It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
John Ashbery
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I listen to music a great deal. In a way, it's trying to express things that can't be expressed in words. That's something that interests me, too. Even though I use words to express myself, I am trying to, it seems to me, get beyond that.
John Ashbery
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A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
John Ashbery
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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
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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
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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
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