Quotes by John Ciardi

“What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.”

“It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their confusions.”

“Every game ever invented by mankind, is a way of making things hard for the fun of it!”

“Every piece of writing... starts from what I call a grit... a sight or sound, a sentence or happening that does not pass away... but quite inexplicably lodges in the mind.”

“Writers will happen in the best of families.”

“It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education is a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”

“All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears”

“Poetry is not a profession, it is a destiny”

“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.”

“I cant change the fact that my paintings dont sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.”

“I thank everyone that has caused me to suffer, without you I would have no reason to express myself.”

“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication”

“Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles”

And the time sundials tellMay be minutes and hours. But it may just as wellBe seconds and sparkles, or seasons and flowers.No, I dont think of time as just minutes and hours.Time can be heartbeats, or bird songs, or miles,Or waves on a beach, or ants in their files(They do move like seconds—just watch their feet go:Tick-tick-tick, like a clock). Youll learn as you growThat whatever there is in a garden, the sunCounts up on its dial. By the time it is doneOur sundial—or someones— will certainly addAll the good things there are. Yes, and all of the bad.And if anyones here for the finish, the sunWill have told him—by sundial—how well we have done.How well we have done, or how badly. Alas,That is a long thought. Let me hope we all pass.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

I have one head that wants to be good,And one that wants to be bad.And always, as soon as I get up,One of my heads is sad.

He had his choice, and he liked the worst.

Most Like an Arch This MarriageMost like an arch—an entrance which upholds and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace. Mass made idea, and idea held in place. A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean into a strength. Two fallings become firm. Two joined abeyances become a term naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is, what’s strong and separate falters. All I do at piling stone on stone apart from you is roofless around nothing. Till we kissI am no more than upright and unset. It is by falling in and in we makethe all-bearing point, for one another’s sake, in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.

The day will happenwhether or not you get up