John Ashbery Short Quotes

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These two guys in the front yard—
Are they here to help?

John Ashbery
Expecting rain, the profile of a day
Wears its soul like a hat....

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

John Ashbery
And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.

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

John Ashbery
In the evening
Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.

John Ashbery
Something like living occurs, a movement Out of the dream into its codification.

John Ashbery
Did I say that? One says so many things, and the problem is they all get written down.

John Ashbery
All beauty, resonance, integrity,
Exist by deprivation or logic
Of strange position.

John Ashbery
To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps
To some reader a latticework of regrets...

John Ashbery
It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes
That all things have their center in their dying....

John Ashbery
Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.

John Ashbery
Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.

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

John Ashbery
A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.

John Ashbery
This whole moment is the groin
Of a borborygmic giant who even now
Is rolling over on us in his sleep.

John Ashbery
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

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

John Ashbery
You stupefied me. We waxed,
Carnivores, late and alight
In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.

John Ashbery
Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,
A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.

John Ashbery
I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer's cave
Where I can fashion eclogues that are chaste and grave.

John Ashbery
The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?

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

John Ashbery
Life is beautiful. He who reads that
As in the window of some distant, speeding train
Knows what he wants, and what will befall.

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
You and I
Are suddenly what the trees try To tell us we are:
That their merely being there Means something; that soon We may touch, love, explain.

John Ashbery
As Parmigianino did it, the right hand Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer And swerving easily away, as though to protect What it advertises.

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
So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain....

John Ashbery