Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Ashbery
Age: 90 †
Born: 1927
Born: July 28
Died: 2017
Died: September 3
Journalist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Rochester
New York
G'on Ashberi
John Ashberry
Jonas Barry
Jon Asshuberī
John Lawrence Ashbery
John Ashbery
Like
Second
Wail
World
Bits
Constitute
Getting
Pocket
Knowledge
Fleeting
History
Replaced
Whole
Pockets
Must
Mad
Mean
General
Featureless

More quotes by John Ashbery

Image
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
John Ashbery
Image
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
Image
The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
John Ashbery
Image
Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
John Ashbery
Image
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
Image
Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
John Ashbery
Image
... 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
Image
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
John Ashbery
Image
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
John Ashbery
Image
Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
John Ashbery
Image
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.
John Ashbery
Image
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
Image
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
Image
All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
John Ashbery
Image
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
Image
A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
John Ashbery
Image
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
Image
I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
John Ashbery
Image
Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
John Ashbery
Image
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