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

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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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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.
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with 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 real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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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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Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in 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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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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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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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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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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originality is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries.
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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.
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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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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
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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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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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