List of John Ciardi Quotes

Honesty: The Ability To Resist Small Temptations.

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.

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.

Conviction Is Possible Only In A World More Primitive Than Ours Can Be Perceived To Be. A Man Can Achieve A Simply Gnomic Conviction Only By Ignoring The Radical Describers Of His Environment, Or By Hating Them, As Convinced Men Have Hated, Say, Darwin And Freud, As Agents Of Some Devil.

Gentility Is What Is Left Over From Rich Ancestors After The Money Is Gone.

A Savage Is Simply A Human Organism That Has Not Received Enough News From The Human Race.

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.

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.

General Rules Have Been Legislated Into Being By Past Masters.

Nothing Goes Further Toward A Man's Liberation Than The Act Of Surviving His Need For Character.

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.

Written By A Sponge Dipped In Warm Milk And Sprinkled With Sugar.