Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
John Ashbery
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Poem
Wants
Cannot
More quotes by 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
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
John Ashbery
Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
John Ashbery
I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
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 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
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
A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
John Ashbery
You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
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
The winter does what it can for its children.
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
Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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
Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.
John Ashbery
It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
John Ashbery
To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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
Silly girls your heads full of boys
John Ashbery