Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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...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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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.
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...the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it...
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...most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute-though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War.
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As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.
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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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...our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.
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Sam is a repetitive, comic process that merely marks time: he gets nowhere, but then he doesn’t want to get anywhere. Although there is no possibility of any real change in Sam, he never stops changing: Sam stays there inside Sam, getting less and less like the rest of mankind and more and more like Sam, Sam squared, Sam cubed, Sam to the nth.
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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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This sort of admission of error, of change, makes us trust a critic as nothing else but omniscience could...
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One is forced to remember how far from 'self-expression' great poems are - what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent.
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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.
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But there is a Pope in the breast of each of us whom is hard to silence. Long ago a lady said to me, when I asked her the composers she liked: 'Dvorak.' I said before I could stop myself: 'Dvorak!' How many times, and with what shame, I’ve remembered it. And now I like Dvorak...
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I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness - that the darkness flung me -Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darknessAnd we call it wisdom. It is pain.
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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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When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.
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The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.
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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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Goethe said, 'The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing'; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: 'I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.' These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
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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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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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At night there are no more farmers, no more farms.At night the fields dream, the fields are the forest.The boy stands looking at the foxAs if, if he looked long enough - he looks at it.Or is it the fox is looking at the boy?The trees can't tell the two of them apart.