Top 81 Randall Jarrell Quotes
#2. It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.
Randall Jarrell
#3. The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
Randall Jarrell
#4. Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
Randall Jarrell
#5. Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.
Randall Jarrell
#6. The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
Randall Jarrell
#8. If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
Randall Jarrell
#9. From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell
#10. When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I'd wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car
See me.
Randall Jarrell
#11. We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn't arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along ...
Randall Jarrell
#12. A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Randall Jarrell
#13. Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By ...
Randall Jarrell
#14. The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.
Randall Jarrell
#15. There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.
Randall Jarrell
#16. The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.
Randall Jarrell
#17. A poet is a person who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times.
Randall Jarrell
#18. If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.
Randall Jarrell
#19. I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.
Randall Jarrell
#20. The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
Randall Jarrell
#21. An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.
Randall Jarrell
#22. Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.
Randall Jarrell
#23. I see at least that all knowledge I wrung from the darkness
that the darkness flung me
is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, the darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness and we call it wisdom. It is pain.
Randall Jarrell
#24. Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.
Randall Jarrell
#26. Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.
Randall Jarrell
#28. Most works of art are, necessarily, bad ... ; one suffers through the many for the few.
Randall Jarrell
#29. People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others ...
Randall Jarrell
#30. Whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell
#32. The really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it ...
Randall Jarrell
#33. Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.
Randall Jarrell
#34. If sometimes we are bogged down in lines full of "corybulous", "hypogeum", "plangent", "irrefragably", "glozening", "tellurian", "conclamant", sometimes we are caught up in the soaring rapture of something unprecedented, absolutely individual.
Randall Jarrell
#35. The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
Randall Jarrell
#36. The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
Randall Jarrell
#37. One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that "the way it really was" half the time is, and half the time isn't, the way it ought to be in the novel.
Randall Jarrell
#39. In the United States, there one feels free ... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.
Randall Jarrell
#40. If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.
Randall Jarrell
#42. How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
Randall Jarrell
#43. One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
Randall Jarrell
#44. You give me the feeling that the universe Was made by something more than human For something less than human. But I identify myself, as always, With something that there's something wrong with, With something human.
Randall Jarrell
#45. The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Randall Jarrell
#46. When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
Randall Jarrell
#47. The tags' chain stirs with the wind; and I sleep
Paid, dead, and a soldier. Who fights for his own life
Loses, loses: I have killed for my world, and am free.
Randall Jarrell
#48. When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.
Randall Jarrell
#49. A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it ...
Randall Jarrell
#52. I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry.
Randall Jarrell
#53. Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
Randall Jarrell
#54. When General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows", he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.
Randall Jarrell
#55. If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.
Randall Jarrell
#56. If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
Randall Jarrell
#57. Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell
#58. If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus .
Randall Jarrell
#59. There is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
Randall Jarrell
#61. Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.
Randall Jarrell
#62. In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.
Randall Jarrell
#63. Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, That were to consider it too curiously.
Randall Jarrell
#64. All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone.
Randall Jarrell
#65. Many poets ... write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
Randall Jarrell
#66. He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
Randall Jarrell
#67. The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not satiric for the very best reasons.
Randall Jarrell
#68. Our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.
Randall Jarrell
#69. I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
Randall Jarrell
#70. More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.
Randall Jarrell
#71. The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.
Randall Jarrell
#72. To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.
Randall Jarrell
#74. Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
Randall Jarrell
#75. Christina Stead has a Chinese say, "Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us" or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.
Randall Jarrell
#77. One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
Randall Jarrell
#78. The hunter and the mermaid were so different from each other that it seemed to them, finally, that they were exactly alike; and they lived together and were happy.
Randall Jarrell
#79. Most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War.
Randall Jarrell
#80. And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judgment of the world.
Randall Jarrell
#81. It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
Randall Jarrell
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