Top 101 Quotes & Sayings by Randall Jarrell

One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.

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.

The blind date that has stood you up: 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.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.

In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.

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 stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

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 you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.

I don't need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost's observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person's random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the "alienated artist" cut off from everybody who isn't, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so - a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)

We can't tell our life from our wish

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.

Read at whim! Read at whim!

Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.

We are all so to speak intellectuals about something.

Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools; and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you. Similarly, you write true things or good things, and end by thinking things true or good simply because you write them

The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not satiric for the very best reasons.

I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry.

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.

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.

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.

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.

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."

One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that "the way it really was" half the time is, and half the time isn't, the way it ought to be in the novel.

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.

If wishes were stories, beggars would read.

The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.

there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.

Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.

our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.

If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.

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.

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.

Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.

I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness - that darkness flung me - Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

originality" is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: "It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries.

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

Some of Mr. Gregory's poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker ; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual smartness, the flat fashionable irony, meaningless because it proceeds from a frame of reference whose amorphous superiority is the most definite thing about it they are the trademark not simply of a magazine but of a class.

I think Miss Moore was right to cut "The Steeple-Jack" - the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state but she has cut too much... The reader may feel like saying, "Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it's hers, isn't it?" No; it's much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody's, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David's left leg.

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.

Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

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.

Doesn't the world need the painter's praise anymore?

Robert Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even - "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity - every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.

Christina Stead has a Chinese say, "Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us" or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

You give me the feeling that the universe Was made by something more than human For something less than human. But I identify myself, as always, With something that there's something wrong with, With something human.

Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.

The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.