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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
Children
Like
Grownups
Obvious
Forgotten
Wisdom
Child
Facts
More quotes by Randall Jarrell
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.
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
The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
Randall Jarrell
Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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
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.
Randall Jarrell
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
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
Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
Randall Jarrell
We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn't arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along...
Randall Jarrell
Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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
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 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
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
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
Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
Randall Jarrell
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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
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.
Randall Jarrell
