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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.

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
Novel
Ought
Half
Really
Way
Things
Time
Puzzling

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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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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Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
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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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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not satiric for the very best reasons.
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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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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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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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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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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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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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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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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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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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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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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.
Randall Jarrell
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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
Randall Jarrell
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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell