Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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...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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The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
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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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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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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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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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He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
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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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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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Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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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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A bat is bornNaked and blind and pale.His mother makes a pocket of her tailAnd catches him. He clings to her long furBy his thumbs and toes and teeth.And then the mother dances through the nightDoubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting -Her baby hangs on underneath.
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People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm: all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others...
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Be, as you have been, my happiness;Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon.
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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets - one they learned at college - and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion.
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...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.