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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
Shadow
Sun
Everybody
Common
Shortened
Always
Denominator
Men
Institution
Lowest
Institutions

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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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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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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I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
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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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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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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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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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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
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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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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
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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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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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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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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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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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