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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
Grownups
Obvious
Forgotten
Wisdom
Child
Facts
Children
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More quotes by Randall Jarrell
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
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
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 real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
Randall Jarrell
The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
Randall Jarrell
Our universities should produce good criticism they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.
Randall Jarrell
Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
Randall Jarrell
If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
Randall Jarrell
Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
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
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
Randall Jarrell
whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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
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
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
