Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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Critics disagree about almost every quality of a writer’s work; and when some agree about a quality, they disagree about whether it is to be praised or blamed, nurtured or rooted out. After enough criticism the writer is covered with lipstick and bruises, and the two are surprisingly evenly distributed.
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If we judge by wealth and power, our times are the best of times; if the times have made us willing to judge by wealth and power, they are the worst of times.
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If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you guilty.
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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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Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did.
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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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How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
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...the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it...
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...if sometimes we are bogged down in lines full of 'corybulous', 'hypogeum', 'plangent', 'irrefragably', 'glozening', 'tellurian', 'conclamant', sometimes we are caught up in the soaring rapture of something unprecedented, absolutely individual.
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...when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as 'a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows', he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.
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The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own.
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...our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.
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A poem is sort of an onion of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms. The significance of a part may be greatly modified or even in extreme cases completely reversed by later and larger parts and by the whole.
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As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.
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We are all-so to speak-intellectuals about something.
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This sort of admission of error, of change, makes us trust a critic as nothing else but omniscience could...
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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.
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It is rare for a novel to have an ending as good as its middle and beginning...
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In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.
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The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas-the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, 'That was a good stroke.'
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A good religious poem, today, is ambergris, and it is hard to enjoy it for thinking of all those suffering whales; but martyrs are born, not made.
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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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Both in verse and in prose Karl Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody’s hair stand on end; he is always crying: 'But he hasn’t any clothes on!' about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.