Randall Jarrell Quotes

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

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.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

Read at whim! Read at whim!

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.

We can't tell our life from our wish

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.

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.

If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.

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.

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.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

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?

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.

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.

The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.

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.

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.

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.

whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.

Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.

If wishes were stories, beggars would read.

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.

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

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.

there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

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.

When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.

We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.

Habits are happiness of a sort...

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.

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.

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.

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.

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.

Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day.

One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.

Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.

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...

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.

Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

We are all so to speak intellectuals about something.

When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.