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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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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You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
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Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
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The winter does what it can for its children.
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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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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.
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The soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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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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It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
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Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
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Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
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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.
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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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