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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.
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
Stretching
Account
Accounts
Return
Present
Invisibly
Point
Reappear
Future
Flexing
Life
Aimless
More quotes by John Ashbery
The sun fades like the spreading Of a peacock's tail, as though twilight Might be read as a warning to those desperate For easy solutions.
John Ashbery
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
John Ashbery
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
Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
John Ashbery
Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
John Ashbery
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
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
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
John Ashbery
Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
John Ashbery
It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
John Ashbery
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
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
You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
John Ashbery
Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
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
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
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
John Ashbery
I'm heading for a clean-named place like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get there without help and nosy proclivities.
John Ashbery
Silly girls your heads full of boys
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