Randall Jarrell Quotes
-
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.
-
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.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
-
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.
-
...whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.
-
A person is a process, one that leads to death...
-
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.
-
We are all-so to speak-intellectuals about something.
-
Somewhere there must be Something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of - think of me!
-
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.'
-
...habits are happiness of a sort...
-
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.
-
President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
-
...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.
-
...there is in this world no line so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.
-
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.
-
...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it...