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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.

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
Habit
Reading
Help
Helping
Doe
Obscurity
Matter
Poets
Would
Clarity
Poet

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 wishes were stories, beggars would read.
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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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How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
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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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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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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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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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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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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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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
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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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.
Randall Jarrell