Quote

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

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
Novel
Wrong
Something
Crafts
Prose
Length
Narrative

More quotes by 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
People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.
Randall Jarrell
Image
A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
Randall Jarrell
Image
If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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
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
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
Randall Jarrell
Image
When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
Randall Jarrell
Image
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
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
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
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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
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
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
Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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
Image
Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
Randall Jarrell