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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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Randall Jarrell
Age: 51 †
Born: 1914
Born: May 6
Died: 1965
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Nashville
Tennessee
Line
Lines
Someone
World
Copy
Copies
Someday

More quotes by 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.
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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 Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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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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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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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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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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Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
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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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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
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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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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
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.
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
Randall Jarrell
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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell