Randall Jarrell Quotes
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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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As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.
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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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Somewhere there must be Something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of - think of me!
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His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring That leers up, joyless, vile, in meek obscenity - This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleatsThe herd back to the pit of being.
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I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class’s teacher, when the class got to Evangeline, kept echoing in my ears: 'We’re coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don’t be babies and start counting the pages.' I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages.
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We are all-so to speak-intellectuals about something.
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Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself - and, sometimes, doing so - is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art.
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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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Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not-or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.
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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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A person is a process, one that leads to death...
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...we are willing to admit the normality of the abnormal-are willing to admit that we never understood the normal better than when it has been allowed to reach its full growth and become the abnormal.
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...there is in this world no line so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.
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We were given drinks, and drank them, and talked while we drank them. But talked, here, is a euphemism: we had that conversation about how you make a Martini. The people in Hell, Dr. Rosenbaum had told me once, say nothing but What? Americans in Hell tell each other how to make Martinis.
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...habits are happiness of a sort...
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President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
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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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...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it...
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If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast - and as someone said, 'If you’re going to hang me, you mustn’t expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.'