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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
Lowest
Institutions
Shadow
Sun
Everybody
Common
Shortened
Always
Denominator
Men
Institution

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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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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If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
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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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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.
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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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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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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...
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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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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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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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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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
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An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.
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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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