Quote

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.

Randall Jarrell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Randall Jarrell
Age: 51 †
Born: 1914
Born: May 6
Died: 1965
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Nashville
Tennessee
Heart
Road
Make
Direct
Good
Pure
World
Wrong
Parnassus
True
Parted
Beautiful
Poem
Look
Tells
Looks
Lips

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

Image
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell
Image
there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
Randall Jarrell
Image
whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
Randall Jarrell
Image
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
Randall Jarrell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.
Randall Jarrell
Image
Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
Randall Jarrell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
Randall Jarrell
Image
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
Randall Jarrell