Randall Jarrell Quotes

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• 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

  Men, Poetry, Lightning

  1953 Poetry and the Age,'The Obscurity of the Poet'.

  44 Copy quote

• 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

  Wisdom, Children, Facts

  Third book of Criticism

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Fighting, Years

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Poetry in War and Peace" (p. 129), 1980.

  10 Copy quote

• The ways we miss our lives are life.

  Randall Jarrell

  Missing, Way, Our Lives

  Randall Jarrell, Mary Jarrell (1985). “Randall Jarrell's letters: an autobiographical and literary selection”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

  10 Copy quote

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Hurt, Pain, Darkness

  Randall Jarrell, Mary Jarrell (1985). “Randall Jarrell's letters: an autobiographical and literary selection”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

  6 Copy quote

• Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.

  Randall Jarrell

  Fall, Writing, Heart

  "The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Fifty Years of American Poetry", pp. 332 - 333, 1969.

  5 Copy quote

• We can't tell our life from our wish

  Randall Jarrell

  Wish, Our Lives

  Randall Jarrell, “A Man Meets A Woman In The Street”

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Poetry, Poet

  Randall Jarrell, Mary Jarrell (1985). “Randall Jarrell's letters: an autobiographical and literary selection”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

  10 Copy quote

• I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness - that 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

  Wisdom, Pain, Ignorance

  Randall Jarrell, Mary Jarrell (1985). “Randall Jarrell's letters: an autobiographical and literary selection”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

  5 Copy quote

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Birthday, Yellow, People

  Randall Jarrell (1965). “A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables”

  8 Copy quote

• Read at whim! Read at whim!

  Randall Jarrell

  Happiness, Whim

  "A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables" by Randall Jarrell, (pp. 112-113), 1962.

  7 Copy quote

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Dark, World, Succeed

  0 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Ornaments, Occupation

  "No Other Book: Selected Essays" by Randall Jarrell, edited by Brad Leithauser, (p. 15), 1999.

  3 Copy quote

• 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

  Rain, Culture, Sun

  Randall Jarrell (1965). “A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables”

  0 Copy quote

• Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.

  Randall Jarrell

  Art, Thinking, Hair

  "The Lost World". Book by Randall Jarrell, p. 159, 1965.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Animal, Form, Human Life

  "Poetry and the Age" by Randall Jarrell, Vintage paperback, (p. 22), 1955.

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• 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

  Dirty, Past, Voice

  Randall Jarrell (2010). “Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy”, p.66, University of Chicago Press

  3 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, World, Way

  2 Copy quote

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Equality, Long, Enough

  4 Copy quote

• Modern" poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are who could endure a century of transition ?

  Randall Jarrell

  Past, Wish, Transition

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "A Note on Poetry" (p. 48), 1980.

  2 Copy quote

• 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

  Decision, Chinese, Age

  "The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrell, "An Unread Book", p. 42, 1969.

  3 Copy quote

• Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.

  Randall Jarrell

  Believe, Writing, Two

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "A Note on Poetry" (p. 50), 1980.

  3 Copy quote

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Scary, Manners, Frightening

  'Pictures from an Institution' (1954) pt. 1, ch. 4

  3 Copy quote

• Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

  Randall Jarrell

  Men, Shadow, Sun

  1954 Pictures from an Institution, pt.5, ch.9.

  0 Copy quote

• 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

  Reality, Want

  Randall Jarrell (1965). “A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables”

  0 Copy quote

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