John Ashbery Life Quotations

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

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.

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night....

But always and sometimes questioning the old modes And the new wondering, the poem, growing up through the floor, Standing tall in tubers, invading and smashing the ritual Parlor, demands to be met on its own terms now, Now that the preliminary negotiations are at last over.

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

Life is not at all what you might think it to be A simple tale where each thing has its history It's much more than its scuffle and anything goes Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.

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

The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how....

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

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.

Will occur as time grows more open about it.

Extreme patience and persistence are required, Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life.

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

Then let yourself love all that you take delight in Accept yourself whole, accept the heritage That shaped you and is passed on from age to age Down to your entity. Remain mysterious; Rather than be pure, accept yourself as numerous.

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

We are prisoners of the world's demented sink. The soft enchantments of our years of innocence Are harvested by accredited experience Our fondest memories soon turn to poison And only oblivion remains in season.

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

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

The soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.