Randall Jarrell Quotes

29 quotes in 295 categories

• The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
• The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
• I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness - that darkness flung me - Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes…
• It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.
• A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning 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.
• Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day.
• Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
• 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.
• If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians…
• To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.
• Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
• The ways we miss our lives are life.
• Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.
• If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
• Doesn't the world need the painter's praise anymore?
• The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
• The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
• Read at whim! Read at whim!
• 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…

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