Quote

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision

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
Indecision
Moment
Moments
Things
Meaningfully
Harden

More quotes by 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
All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
John Ashbery
Image
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
John Ashbery
Image
The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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 soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
John Ashbery
Image
It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
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
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
John Ashbery
Image
The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?
John Ashbery
Image
Silly girls your heads full of boys
John Ashbery
Image
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.
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
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
Image
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
John Ashbery
Image
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
Image
To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
John Ashbery
Image
You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
John Ashbery
Image
The ellipse is as aimless as that, Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear In our present. Its flexing is its account, Return to the point of no return.
John Ashbery
Image
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.
John Ashbery