Quotes from 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.

You and IAre suddenly what the trees tryTo tell us we are:That their merely being thereMeans something; that soonWe may touch, love, explain.

As I sit looking out of a window of the buildingI wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.

We were surprised once, long ago; and now we can never be surprised again.

As Parmigianino did it, the right handBigger than the head, thrust at the viewerAnd swerving easily away, as though to protectWhat it advertises.

Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity.

Walter Pater said that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, but I've always felt that music aspires to the condition of words.

A little bunny or some kind of ferret was probably there too, and bore witness as only rodents can.

Try a little subtlety in self-defense; it'll help, you'll find out.

The genius of Cornell is that he sees and enables us to see with the eyes of childhood, before our vision got clouded by experience, when objects like a rubber ball or a pocket mirror seemed charged with meaning, and a marble rolling across a wooden floor could be as portentous as a passing comet.

Transgress. In a word, be other than yourself in turning into your love-soaked opposite.

It was all as it had been, except for the weight of the present, that scuttled the pact we made with heaven. In truth there was no cause for rejoicing, nor need to turn around, either. We were lost just by standing, listening to the hum of wires overhead.

It's important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or when the weather is wrong.

You bad birds, But God shall not punish you, you Shall be with us in heaven, though less Conscious of your happiness, perhaps, than we. Hell is a not quite satisfactory heaven, probably, But you are the fruit and jewels Of my arrangement . . .

It is the lumps and trials That tell us whether we shall be known And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.

I could have made a casserole out of these things, but you always say you like to know what you're eating.

My poetry is often criticized for a failure to communicate, but I take issue with this; my intention is to communicate and my feeling is that a poem that communicates something that's already known by the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect for him.

You have to try to imagine an ideal reader, who's neither stupid nor able to know what your thoughts are.

Leaves around the door are penciled losses.

It was always November there.

The seasons are no longer what they once were, But it is the nature of things to be seen only once, As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along Somehow.

I have only my intermittent life in your thoughts to live Which is like thinking in another language. Everything Depends on whether somebody reminds you of me.

The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?" Self-Portrait In a Convex Mirror

Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, Our days put on such reticence These accents seem their own defense.