Quote

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

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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
Little
Everything
Stench
Mind
Hospitable
Like
Dissipated
Taking
Knowledge
Learn
Littles

More quotes by 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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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.
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Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
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The winter does what it can for its children.
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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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It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
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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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I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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Silly girls your heads full of boys
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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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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.
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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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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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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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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.
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Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse. Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.
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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 soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?
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