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Life is not at all what you might think it to be A simple tale where each thing has its history It's much more than its scuffle and anything goes Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.

John Ashbery

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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
Think
Evil
Tale
Thinking
History
Tales
Life
Inspirational
Subject
Anything
Laws
Might
Subjects
Thing
Goes
Much
Law
Good
Simple

More quotes by John Ashbery

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Some certified nut Will try to tell you it's poetry, (It's extraordinary, it makes a great deal of sense) But watch out or he'll start with some New notion or other.
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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.
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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.
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Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
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I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
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Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
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.
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You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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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.
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Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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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.
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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
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The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
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