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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?
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
Means
Treats
Ends
Forces
Mean
Expect
Every
Trade
Meet
Novel
Imperfect
Moral
Novelists
Force
Treat
More quotes by Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.
Randall Jarrell
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
The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
Randall Jarrell
The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
Randall Jarrell
Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
Randall Jarrell
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
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
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Randall Jarrell
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
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.
Randall Jarrell
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
there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
Randall Jarrell
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
Randall Jarrell
When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
Randall Jarrell
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
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell
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
If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
Randall Jarrell
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
