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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

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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.
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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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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 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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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.
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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
Randall Jarrell
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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
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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.
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell
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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
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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
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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell
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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
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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
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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