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

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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
Good
Pure
World
Wrong
Parnassus
True
Parted
Beautiful
Poem
Look
Tells
Looks
Lips
Heart
Road
Make
Direct

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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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.
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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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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.
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If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote 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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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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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.
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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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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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If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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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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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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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.
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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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An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.
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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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