Quotes by : John Ashbery

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

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

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

until only infinity remained of beauty

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

So one can lose a good ideaby not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other....

The music brought us what it seemed / We had long desired, but in a form / so rarefied there was no emptiness....

I'm heading for a clean-named placelike Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get therewithout....

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision

It is the lumps and trialsThat tell us whether we shall be knownAnd whether our fate can be exemplary,....