Quotes from John Ashbery

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you?

Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.

The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes

In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision

How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you.

until only infinity remained of beauty

The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.

Once you've lived in France, you don't want to live anywhere else, including France.

Just when I thought there wasn't room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea—

The evening light was like honey in the trees When you left me and walked to the end of the street Where the sunset abruptly ended. The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself To the fragile forget-me-not flower. You climbed aboard. Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones, Dreams I had, including suicide, Puff out the hot-air balloon now. It is bursting, it is about to burst

So one can lose a good idea by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier.

We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of / isolated instants / So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.

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

Some day we will try To do as many things as are possible And perhaps we shall succeed at a handful Of them, but this will not have anything To do with what is promised today, our Landscape sweeping out from us to disappear On the horizon.

Oh there once was a woman and she kept a shop selling trinkets to tourists not far from a dock who came to see what life could be far back on the island. And it was always a party there always different but very nice New friends to give you advice or fall in love with you which is nice and each grew so perfectly from the other it was a marvel of poetry and irony

This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free. Alas, the summer's energy wanes quickly, A moment and it is gone. And no longer May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are. Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.

as if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.

But it is the same thing we are all seeing, Our world. Go after it, Go get it boy, says the man holding the stick. Eat, says the hunger, and we plunge blindly in again, Into the chamber behind the thought

The music brought us what it seemed / We had long desired, but in a form / so rarefied there was no emptiness of sensation

The facts of history have been too well rehearsed (I'm speaking needless to say not of written history but the oral kind that goes on in you without your having to do anything about it). . .

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.

Where then shall hope and fear their objects find? The harbor cold to the mating ships, And you have lost as you stand by the balcony With the forest of the sea calm and gray beneath. A strong impression torn from the descending light But night is guilty. You knew the shadow In the trunk was raving But as you keep growing hungry you forget. The distant box is open. A sound of grain Poured over the floor in some eagerness--we Rise with the night let out of the box of wind.