Quote

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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Randall Jarrell
Age: 51 †
Born: 1914
Born: May 6
Died: 1965
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Nashville
Tennessee
Either
Frequently
Write
Impressed
Death
Overwhelming
Doe
Author
Nothing
Notice
Writing
Importance
Slightest
Life
Subjects
Chooses
Saying
Solemn

More quotes by 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.
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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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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
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I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave but you should worry.
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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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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
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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 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 you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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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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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.
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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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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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Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
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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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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.
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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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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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