A. R. Ammons Quotes

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.

Disorder brings about order.

Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.

There is no instant step from disorder to order.

I think structure is so deep in us. We put it in stories we tell our friends or in emails we write. We want it. It's how we create meaning.

Chaos is the natural state, and theater tries to make sense of it, but it's got to be a little messy to be believable.

Form is all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults. Formulating something is a great start. I trust form, trust my feeling or capacity to find the right form for something. Even if that is only by being well organized. That too is form.

Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.

No one welcomes chaos, but why crave stability and predictability?

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.

Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. Like beams in a house or bones to a body, so is order to all things.

Routine is not organization, any more than paralysis is order.

One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.

People seem to be looking for discipline in a topsy-turvy world.

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

I think that we must find some way to get more common sense, more rationality, in our decisions and less emotion.

It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details.

What people want, above all, is order.

It's all about consistency, and what makes a child or a dog secure: order, clarity - all those things.

Order is a great person's need and their true well being.

The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.

My preference for clear structures is the result of my desire - perhaps illusory - to keep track of things and maintain my grip on the world.

For me, poetry is always a search for order.

I do think from time to time that conceptual questions arise: What do we mean by equilibrium? What do we mean by this concept and that concept?