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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
Men
Core
Harder
Age
Happy
Light
Change
Things
Never
Burns
More quotes by 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
It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
John Ashbery
The soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
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
I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
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
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
Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
John Ashbery
All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
John Ashbery
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.
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 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
Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
John Ashbery
The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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
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
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
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
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
