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People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.
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
People
Beast
Equally
Seemed
Animal
Detestable
Rather
Gertrude
Others
Beasts
Always
Farm
Like
Farms
More quotes by Randall Jarrell
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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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 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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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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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
Randall Jarrell
If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
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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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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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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 novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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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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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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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.
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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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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
Randall Jarrell
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
Randall Jarrell
