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Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

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
Always
Denominator
Men
Institution
Lowest
Institutions
Shadow
Sun
Everybody
Common
Shortened

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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.
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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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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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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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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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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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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.
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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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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 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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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
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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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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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
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If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
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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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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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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