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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

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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
Facts
Children
Like
Grownups
Obvious
Forgotten
Wisdom
Child

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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
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The safest way to avoid the world is through art and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
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It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.
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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.
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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.
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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.
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People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.
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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.
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The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.
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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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I shook myself I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class's teacher, when the class got to Evangeline , kept echoing in my ears: We're coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don't be babies and start counting the pages. I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages.
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If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
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Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
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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.
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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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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?
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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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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.
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