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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
Realizing
Decision
Age
Making
Stead
Ever
Christina
Without
Chinese
Made
Worse
Life
Perhaps
More quotes by Randall Jarrell
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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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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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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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
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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.
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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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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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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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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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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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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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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.
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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
Randall Jarrell
