Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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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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In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.
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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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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 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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To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.
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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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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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Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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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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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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...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.
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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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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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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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Gertrude Johnson could feel no real respect for, no real interest in, anybody who wasn't a writer. For her there were two species: writers and people; and the writers were really people, and the people weren't.
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He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
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Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit-is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, 'personalized', bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.
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Death and the devil, what are these to him? His being accuses him - and yet his face is firm In resolution, in absolute persistence; The folds of smiling do for steadiness; The face is its own fate - a man does what he must - And the body underneath it says: I am.
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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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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.
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Who would be such a fool as to make advances to his reader, advances which might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?