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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.

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
Criticism
Prisoners
Produce
Universities
Less
Vocation
Money
Prisoner
Surreptitiously
Best
Continuing
Vocations
Real
Federal
Counterfeit
Good
University
Hardened
Prison
Prisons

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
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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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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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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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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.
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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 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 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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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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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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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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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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
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
Randall Jarrell
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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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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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