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... the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon.
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
Somebody
West
Feeling
Sun
Feelings
Moon
Ends
Step
Firsts
Toward
Hopelessness
Journey
Utter
First
Terrible
Confusion
Steps
East
More quotes by John Ashbery
A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
John Ashbery
To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
John Ashbery
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.
John Ashbery
I listen to music a great deal. In a way, it's trying to express things that can't be expressed in words. That's something that interests me, too. Even though I use words to express myself, I am trying to, it seems to me, get beyond that.
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
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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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
John Ashbery
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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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
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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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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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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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
Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
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.
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The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
John Ashbery