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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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Randall Jarrell
Age: 51 †
Born: 1914
Born: May 6
Died: 1965
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Nashville
Tennessee
Life
Perhaps
Realizing
Decision
Age
Making
Stead
Ever
Christina
Without
Chinese
Made
Worse
More quotes by Randall Jarrell
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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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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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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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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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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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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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
Randall Jarrell
If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
Randall Jarrell
The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
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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
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
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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.
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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.
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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
Randall Jarrell
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.
Randall Jarrell
A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
Randall Jarrell
