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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.
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
Happy
Light
Change
Things
Never
Burns
Men
Core
Harder
Age
More quotes by 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
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
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
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
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
Silly girls your heads full of boys
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
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
Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole Like some pocket history of the world, so general As to constitute a sob or wail
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
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
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
It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
John Ashbery
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
John Ashbery
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
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
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
John Ashbery
I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
John Ashbery
You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
John Ashbery