61 Quotes by A. R. Ammons

Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.

You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind ON, but what you can't keep your mind OFF.

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without

If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.