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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

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
Poetry
Animal
Existence
Form
Human
Humans
Without

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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.
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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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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy 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.
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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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The safest way to avoid the world is through art and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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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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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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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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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 novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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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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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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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
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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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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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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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