A. R. Ammons Quotes

Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors.

One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.

If you read, the world is your oyster. It truly is. Reading makes everything possible.

Life is weird and complex but very simple at the same time. It's all about perception.

All readers are tourists. We want to make sense of what we see and hear, to find the balance between what is unknown and what we can call ours.

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination, and wonder.

It's always about finding the right balance between answering some questions and raising new ones to keep your story going.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

If there were no mystery left to explore life would get rather dull, wouldn't it?

I'm always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.

It's an infinite creative universe to explore so why chase conservative options?

No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.

Knowledge once gained casts a light beyond its own immediate boundaries.