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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
Look
Tells
Looks
Lips
Heart
Road
Make
Direct
Good
Pure
World
Wrong
Parnassus
True
Parted
Beautiful
Poem
More quotes by Randall Jarrell
Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
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
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
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
Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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
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...
Randall Jarrell
The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
Randall Jarrell
Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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
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
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
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.
Randall Jarrell
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
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.
Randall Jarrell
When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
Randall Jarrell
Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
Randall Jarrell
It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.
Randall Jarrell
