A. R. Ammons Quotes

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

Nothing to do with anything, something to do with everything.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

The top of one mountain is always the bottom of another.

History is messy, undetermined, and layered.

There are no simple answers in life. There is a good and bad in everyone and everything. No decision is made without consequence. No road is taken that doesn't lead to another. What's important is that those roads always be kept open, for there's no telling what wonder they might lead to.

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?

Nature, like a true poet, abhors abrupt transitions.

...with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.

So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.

I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.

Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

Every ripple on the ocean, every leaf on every tree, every sand dune in the desert, every power we never see.

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth which is not related to something or other.

All things are delicately interconnected.

We are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live his life for himself alone.

The trap does not work until all the parts were there. The system itself doesn't work until you fit all of them together.

Please do not understand me too quickly.

Cycling, cycling forever bear, wolf, caribou. When had it all started, where will it end? We are all part of one, from such simple beginnings and yet all so different. Yet one. One and again.

Nothing in Nature, much less conscious being, Was e'er created solely for itself.

We are educated to be amazed by the infinite variety of life forms in nature. We are, I believe, only at the beginning of being flabbergasted by its unity.