Randall Jarrell Quotes
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.
Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
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.
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.
A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.
The dark uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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.
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.
