John Ciardi QUOTES

1 " 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

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

― John Ciardi

3 " 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. "

― John Ciardi

4 " 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

5 " He had his choice, and he liked the worst. "

― John Ciardi , The Monster Den: or Look What Happened at My House — and to It

6 " 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

7 " The day will happen
whether or not you get up "

― John Ciardi

8 " A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. "

― John Ciardi

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " Hell is the denial of the ordinary... "

― John Ciardi

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone "

― John Ciardi

15 " 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

16 " The public library is the most dangerous place in town "

― John Ciardi

17 " 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

18 " The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself. "

― John Ciardi

19 " A good question is never answered. "

― John Ciardi

20 " The day will happen whether or not you get up. "

― John Ciardi

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