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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
Everybody
Common
Shortened
Always
Denominator
Men
Institution
Lowest
Institutions
Shadow
Sun

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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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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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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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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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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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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
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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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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.
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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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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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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 dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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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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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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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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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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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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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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