Randall Jarrell Quotes
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...man is the animal that moralizes. Man is also the animal that complains about being one, and says that there is an animal, a beast inside him-that he is brother to dragons. (He is certainly a brother to wolves, and to pandas too, but he is father to dragons, not brother: they, like many gods and devils, are inventions of his.)
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The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
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It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are, in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who stays legally innocuous by means of it.
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...the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.
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Mrs. Robbins asked: 'If I am not for myself, who then is for me?'-and she was for herself so passionately that the other people in the world decided that they were not going to let Pamela Robbins beat them at her own game, and stopped playing.
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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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We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life - in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us access - unwillingly accuses our lives.
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If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.
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IRENE ROSENBAUM: ...'you Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause'...
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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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If wishes were stories, beggars would read...
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Alexander North Whitehead is supposed to have said of Bertrand Russell: 'Bertie thinks me muddleheaded and I think Bertie simple-minded.'
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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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People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.
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The soul has no assignments, neither cooks Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time.Here in this enclave there are centuries For you to waste: the short and narrow stream Of life meanders into a thousand valleys Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be. The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly.
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A farmer is separated from a farmerBy what farmers have in common: forests,Those dark things - what the fields were to begin with.At night a fox comes out of the forest, eats his chickens.At night the deer come out of the forest, eat his crops.
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What Miss Moore’s best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it 'comes into and steadies the soul,' so that the reader feels himself 'a life prisoner, but reconciled.'
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From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
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We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)
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Compare the saint who, asked what he would do if he had only an hour to live, replied that he would go on with his game of chess, since it was as much worship as anything else he had ever done.
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Let’s say this together: 'Great me no greats', and leave this grading to posterity.
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What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who 'held the mirror up to nature' would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art’s fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention-the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on-is as much of a signature as anything in it.
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The Author to the Reader I’ve read that Luther said (it’s come to me So often that I’ve made it into meter):And even if the world should end tomorrowI still would plant my little apple-tree.Here, reader, is my little apple-tree.
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Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets-and, in a better world, it may be; but in this world writers like Constance Carrier are the well oysters that don’t have the pearls.