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

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.
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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 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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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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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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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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Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.
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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 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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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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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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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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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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 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.
Randall Jarrell
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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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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
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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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