Quote

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

Randall Jarrell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Randall Jarrell
Age: 51 †
Born: 1914
Born: May 6
Died: 1965
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Nashville
Tennessee
People
Aging
Golden
Usually
Age
Around
Live
Yellow
Everything
Birthday
Looks
Complaining

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
Randall Jarrell
Image
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
Randall Jarrell
Image
If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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?
Randall Jarrell
Image
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell