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
Death
Overwhelming
Doe
Author
Notice
Nothing
Importance
Slightest
Writing
Subjects
Chooses
Life
Saying
Solemn
Either
Frequently
Write
Impressed

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
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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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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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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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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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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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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote 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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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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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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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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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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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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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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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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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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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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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