Quote

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

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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
Source
Geniuses
Information
Reliable
Came
Distrust
Waiting
Empathy
Didn
Till
Much
Tend
Always
Genius
Along
Arouse

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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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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It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.
Randall Jarrell
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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
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
Randall Jarrell
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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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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
Randall Jarrell
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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
Randall Jarrell
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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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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell
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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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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
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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
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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
Randall Jarrell
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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
Randall Jarrell
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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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Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, That were to consider it too curiously.
Randall Jarrell