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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
Sun
Everybody
Common
Shortened
Always
Denominator
Men
Institution
Lowest
Institutions
Shadow

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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.
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote 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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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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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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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.
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Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.
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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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