John Ciardi

“One night I dreamed I was locked in my Father's watchWith Ptolemy and twenty-one ruby starsMounted on spheres and the Primum MobileCoiled and gleaming to the end of spaceAnd the notched spheres eating each other's rindsTo the last tooth of time, and the case closed.”

“There was a young lady from GloucesterWho 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.”

“I once knew a word I forgetThat mean "I am sorry we metAnd I wish you the same."It sounds like your nameBut I haven't remember that yet.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“And the time sundials tellMay be minutes and hours. But it may just as wellBe 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 growThat whatever there is in a garden, the sunCounts up on its dial. By the time it is doneOur sundial—or someone's— will certainly addAll the good things there are. Yes, and all of the bad.And if anyone's 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.”

“He had his choice, and he liked the worst.”

“The day will happenwhether or not you get up”

“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. ”

“Hell is the denial of the ordinary...”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“A good question is never answered.”

“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.”

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

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

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