John Ciardi Quotations

The day will happen whether or not you get up.

Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen.

The classroom should be an entrance into the world, not an escape from it.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Nothing goes further toward a man's liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

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.

Every parent is at some time the father of the unreturned prodigal, with nothing to do but keep his house open to hope.

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.

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

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

The constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.

Written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar.

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

There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.

Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

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

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.

But when the pen is in his hand he has to write by itch and twitch, though certainly his itch and twitch are intimately conditioned by all his past itching and twitching, and by all his past theorizing about them.

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

Bah! You asked for it. This is your life. The price is right enough. You've got no secrets. People are . . . well, never mind. But tell me, boys and girls and Federal gentlemen, has anyone had time to think of Khrushchev lately?

It's not a how-to-do-it school but more nearly a confessional in which people who have spent their lives at the writing process itemize their failures while clinging to their hopes.

A university is a reading and discussion club. If students knew how to use the library, they wouldn't need the rest of the buildings. The faculty's job, in great part, is to teach students how to use a library in a living way. All a student should really need is access to the library and a place to sleep.

Boys are the cash of war.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

Spontaneous is what you get after the seventeenth draft.

The thing about cats as you might find, is that no one knows what they have in mind.

General rules have been legislated into being by past masters.

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.

Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations.

A carbonated wine foisted upon Americans (who else would drink it?) by winery ad agencies as a way of getting rid of inferior champagne by mixing it with inferior burgundy.

Patience is the art of caring slowly.

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

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.

Conviction is possible only in a world more primitive than ours can be perceived to be. A man can achieve a simply gnomic conviction only by ignoring the radical describers of his environment, or by hating them, as convinced men have hated, say, Darwin and Freud, as agents of some devil.

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.

The public library is the most dangerous place in town

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

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.

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.

Fermentation equals civilization.

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.

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.

A dollar saved is a quarter earned.

There's nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.

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

Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.

Within a single scene, it seems to be unwise to have access to the inner reflections of more than one character. The reader generally needs a single character as the means of perception, as the character to whom the events are happening, as the character with whom he is to empathize in order to have the events of the writing happen to him.

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

You have to fall in love with hanging around words.

Let our love be like an arch- two weaknesses leaning together to form one strength.

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.

Men marry what they need. I marry you.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone