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Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko's art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.

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
Part
Poetry
May
Strength
Doubt
Literature
Whether
Fact
Facts
Art
Pollock

More quotes by John Ashbery

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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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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Extreme patience and persistence are required, Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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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.
John Ashbery
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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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I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
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