John Ciardi Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.

John Ciardi
You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

John Ciardi
Every game ever invented by mankind, is a way of making things hard for the fun of it!

John Ciardi
It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their conviction. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their convictions.

John Ciardi
The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn't deserve it, give it to him anyhow.

John Ciardi
At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected, I shall forgive last the delicately wounded who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never got up again, neither to fight back, nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration.

John Ciardi
A man is what he does with his attention and mine is not for sale.

John Ciardi
Who could believe an ant in theory? A giraffe in blueprint? Ten thousand doctors of what's possible Could reason half the jungle out of being.

John Ciardi
I have one head that wants to be good,
And one that wants to be bad.
And always, as soon as I get up,
One of my heads is sad.

John Ciardi
If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

John Ciardi
Boys are the cash of war. Whoever said: we're not free spenders- doesn't know our like.

John Ciardi
One night I dreamed I was locked in my Father's watch
With Ptolemy and twenty-one ruby stars
Mounted on spheres and the Primum Mobile
Coiled and gleaming to the end of space
And the notched spheres eating each other's rinds
To the last tooth of time, and the case closed.

John Ciardi
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.

John Ciardi
There was a young lady from Gloucester
Who complained that her parents both bossed her,
So she ran off to Maine.
Did her parents complain?
Not at all — they were glad to have lost her.

John Ciardi
Early to bed and early to rise probably indicates unskilled labor.

John Ciardi
I write as an alcoholic drinks, compulsively and for its own sake.

John Ciardi
The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.

John Ciardi
I'm smiled out, talked out, quipped out, socialized so far from any being, I need the weight of mortal silences to get realized back into myself.

John Ciardi
What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

John Ciardi