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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.

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
Breaking
Philosophical
Keeps
Reality
Young
Trying
Methodical

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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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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I shook myself I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class's teacher, when the class got to Evangeline , kept echoing in my ears: We're coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don't be babies and start counting the pages. I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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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The safest way to avoid the world is through art and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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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Christina Stead has a Chinese say, Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
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.
Randall Jarrell
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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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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By.
Randall Jarrell
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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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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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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.
Randall Jarrell
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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell