Randall Jarrell Quotes
Top 49 wise famous quotes and sayings by Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Randall Jarrell on Wise Famous Quotes.
Our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.
It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.
People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others ...
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?
If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.
Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By ...
Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
Many poets ... write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
A poet is a person who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times.
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
In the United States, there one feels free ... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.
Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.
There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.