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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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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
Window
Wants
Inspirational
Beautiful
Befall
Life
Speeding
Reads
Distant
Train
More quotes by John Ashbery
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
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
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
John Ashbery
The winter does what it can for its children.
John Ashbery
The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
John Ashbery
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
John Ashbery
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
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
John Ashbery
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
I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
John Ashbery
It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
John Ashbery
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
All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
John Ashbery
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
To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
John Ashbery
I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
John Ashbery
A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
John Ashbery
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
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
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
John Ashbery
