Randall Jarrell Quotes
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Marx said that he had stood Hegel on his head; often Mr. Horace Gregory has simply stood Pollyana on her head.
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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...
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It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
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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.
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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.
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A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.
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One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
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...girls who had read Wittgenstein as high school baby-sitters were rejected because the school’s quota of abnormally intelligent students had already been filled that year.
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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.
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The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
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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.
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In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.
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To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.
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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.
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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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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.
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He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
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When we read what Goethe says about men we are ashamed of what we have said; when we read what he says about painting and statues we are ashamed of what Goethe has said.
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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.
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How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, 'Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t' - is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.
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The characteristic poetic strategy of our time-refine your singularities-is something Auden has not learned; so his best poems are very peculiarly good, nearly the most interesting poems of our time. When he writes badly, we can afford to be angry at him, and he can afford to laugh at us.
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For this last savior, man,I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying? Men wash their hands in blood, as best they can:I find no fault in this just man.
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Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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You give me the feeling that the universeWas made by something more than humanFor something less than human.But I identify myself, as always,With something that there's something wrong with,With something human.