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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.
Randall Jarrell
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Randall Jarrell
Age: 51 †
Born: 1914
Born: May 6
Died: 1965
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Nashville
Tennessee
Possible
Tenths
Read
Idolatry
Culture
Intellectuals
Think
Definition
Thinking
Definitions
Nine
Poetry
Modern
More quotes by Randall Jarrell
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
Randall Jarrell
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
Randall Jarrell
Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, That were to consider it too curiously.
Randall Jarrell
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
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.
Randall Jarrell
It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.
Randall Jarrell
The safest way to avoid the world is through art and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
Randall Jarrell
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
Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
Randall Jarrell
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
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
Randall Jarrell
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
The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
Randall Jarrell
there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
Randall Jarrell
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
If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
Randall Jarrell
