John Ashbery Quotes

Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.

Distance makes everything beautiful.

... when he saw her sitting there all alone, so young, and good, and beautiful, and kind to him; and heard her thrilling voice, so natural and sweet, and such a golden link between him and all his life's love and happiness, rising out of the silence; he turned his face away, and hid his tears.

The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?

The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says They are not only yours; the beautiful changes In such kind ways, Wishing ever to sunder Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

To leave out beautiful sunsets is the secret of good taste.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.

Unless you can surround yourself with as many beautiful things as you can afford, I don't think life has very much meaning.

With lacquerware there is an extra beauty in that moment between removing the lid and lifting the bowl to the mouth, when one gazes at the still, silent liquid in the dark depths of the bowl, its colour hardly differing from that of the bowl itself. What lies within the darkness one cannot distinguish, but the palm senses the gentle movements of the liquid, vapour rises from within, forming droplets on the rim, and the fragrance carried upon the vapour brings a delicate anticipation ... a moment of mystery, it might almost be called, a moment of trance.

To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

The streetlight outside my house shines on tonight and I'm watching it like it could give me a vision. James ain't talked ever and he looks at that streetlight like it was a word and maybe like it was a verb. James wanted to streetlight me and make me bright and beautiful so all the moths and bats would circle me like I was the center of the world an held secrets.

One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, "How beautiful the world could be.

By means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful.

Because words were hills and valleys you traveled, so lovely sometimes that they hurt your eyes.

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

Life is beautiful in all it's colors, even the darker ones, they're here for a reason.

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew… Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful... and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.

The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment’s silence, "Perhaps more so.

I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.

A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors