John Ciardi > Quotes

“I'm smiled out, talked out, quipped out, socialized so far from any being, I need the weight of mortal silences to get realized back into myself.”
― John Ciardi, This Strangest Everything

“The day will happen
whether or not you get up”
― John Ciardi

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

“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.”
― John Ciardi, You Read to Me, I'll Read to You: Imaginative and Humorous Illustrated Poems for Kids (Ages 4-8) to Read Aloud with Adults

“Translator's Note: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same "music", the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.”
― John Ciardi, Inferno

“You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone”
― John Ciardi

“He had his choice, and he liked the worst.”
― John Ciardi, The Monster Den: or Look What Happened at My House — and to It

“Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old. ”
― John Ciardi

“A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. ”
― John Ciardi

“A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.”
― John Ciardi

“There was a young lady from Gloucester
Who complained that her parents both bossed her,
So she ran off to Maine.
Did her parents complain?
Not at all -- they were glad to have lost her.”
― John Ciardi, The Hopeful Trout and Other Limericks

“To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.”
― John Ciardi

“The public library is the most dangerous place in town”
― John Ciardi

“The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.”
― John Ciardi

“One night I dreamed I was locked in my Father's watch
With Ptolemy and twenty-one ruby stars
Mounted on spheres and the Primum Mobile
Coiled and gleaming to the end of space
And the notched spheres eating each other's rinds
To the last tooth of time, and the case closed.”
― John Ciardi, The Collected Poems

“The day will happen whether or not you get up.”
― John Ciardi

“A good question is never answered.”
― John Ciardi

“A man is what he does with his attention.”
― John Ciardi

“You don't have to suffer to be a poet”
― John Ciardi

“The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“Hell is the denial of the ordinary...”
― John Ciardi

“Most Like an Arch This Marriage

Most 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 kiss

I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another’s sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.”
― John Ciardi, The Collected Poems

“Poetry is man’s best means of perceiving most profoundly the action and the consequence of his own emotions.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“I once knew a word I forget
That mean "I am sorry we met
And I wish you the same."
It sounds like your name
But I haven't remember that yet.”
― John Ciardi, The Hopeful Trout and Other Limericks

“What greater violence can be done to the poet’s experience than to drag it into an early morning classroom and to go after it as an item on its way to a Final Examination? …It is the experience, not the Final Examination, that counts.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“And the time sundials tell
May be minutes and hours. But it may just as well
Be seconds and sparkles, or seasons and flowers.
No, I don't 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). You'll learn as you grow
That whatever there is in a garden, the sun
Counts up on its dial. By the time it is done
Our sundial—or someone's— will certainly add
All the good things there are. Yes, and all of the bad.
And if anyone's here for the finish, the sun
Will 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.”
― John Ciardi, The Monster Den: or Look What Happened at My House — and to It

“Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens to let us in.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“Who could believe an ant in theory? A giraffe in blueprint? Ten thousand doctors of what's possible Could reason half the jungle out of being.”
― John Ciardi

“Good writing tends to present evidence rather than judgments. When the evidence is well presented, the reader’s judgments will agree with those implicit in the writing. But nothing is more disastrous to the communication between writer and reader than a series of implicit judgments with which the reader cannot agree or which he finds to be simply silly or for which he is given no evidence he can respect.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots.”
― John Ciardi