Top 50 John Ashbery Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A yak is a prehistoric cabbage; of that, we can be sure.”

— John Ashbery

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

— John Ashbery

3. “I write with experiences in mind, but I don’t write about them, I write out of them.”

— John Ashbery

4. “Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!”

— John Ashbery

5. “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?”

— John Ashbery

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

— John Ashbery

7. “Until, accustomed to disappointments, you can let yourself rule and be ruled by these strings or emanations that connect everything together, you haven’t fully exorcised the demon of doubt that sets you in motion like a rocking horse that cannot stop rocking.”

— John Ashbery

8. “I am often asked why I write, and I don’t know really – I just want to.”

— John Ashbery

9. “What I like about music is its ability to be convincing, to carry an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of the argument remain unknown quantities.”

— John Ashbery

10. “And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.”

— John Ashbery

11. “I don’t find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.”

— John Ashbery

12. “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.”

— John Ashbery

13. “Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?”

— John Ashbery

14. “Walter Pater said that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, but I’ve always felt that music aspires to the condition of words.”

— John Ashbery

15. “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.”

— John Ashbery

16. “Poetry is mostly hunches.”

— John Ashbery

17. “Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.”

— John Ashbery

18. “The winter does what it can for its children.”

— John Ashbery

19. “We might realize that the present moment may be one of an eternal or sempiternal series of moments, all of which will resemble it because, in some ways, they are the present, and won’t in other ways, because the present will be the past by that time.”

— John Ashbery

20. “How funny your name would be if you could follow it back to where the first person thought of saying it, naming himself that, or maybe some other persons thought of it and named that person. It would be like following a river to its source, which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.”

— John Ashbery

21. “I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.”

— John Ashbery

22. “Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.”

— John Ashbery

Featured in: Reading Quotes

23. “Just when I thought there wasn’t room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea –.”

— John Ashbery

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

— John Ashbery

25. “The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.”

— John Ashbery

26. “Once you’ve lived in France, you don’t want to live anywhere else, including France.”

— John Ashbery

27. “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.”

— John Ashbery

Featured in: Strong Quotes

28. “I don’t want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.”

— John Ashbery

29. “Darkness fell like a wet sponge.”

— John Ashbery

30. “Each servant stamps the reader with a look.”

— John Ashbery

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— John Ashbery

32. “I don’t look on poetry as closed works. I feel they’re going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.”

— John Ashbery

33. “Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision.”

— John Ashbery

34. “What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?”

— John Ashbery

35. “Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.”

— John Ashbery

36. “Silly girls your heads full of boys.”

— John Ashbery

37. “A perfect example of the new republic’s urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.”

— John Ashbery

38. “Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko’s art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.”

— John Ashbery

39. “I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.”

— John Ashbery

40. “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.”

— John Ashbery

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

— John Ashbery

42. “The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.”

— John Ashbery

43. “Transgress. In a word, be other than yourself in turning into your love-soaked opposite.”

— John Ashbery

44. “If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”

— John Ashbery

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

— John Ashbery

46. “My poetry is often criticized for a failure to communicate, but I take issue with this; my intention is to communicate and my feeling is that a poem that communicates something that’s already known by the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect for him.”

— John Ashbery

47. “I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.”

— John Ashbery

48. “It never seems to occur to anyone that each reader is different, and that even those who might be said to resemble each other will each bring an individual set of experiences and references to their reading, and interpret and misinterpret it according to these.”

— John Ashbery

Featured in: Reading Quotes

49. “The mind Is so hospitable, taking in everything Like boarders, and you don’t see until It’s all over how little there was to learn Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated.”

— John Ashbery

50. “I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another.”

— John Ashbery