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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote 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
Way
Poem
Wrote
Forget
Making
Speak
More quotes by Randall Jarrell
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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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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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.
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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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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
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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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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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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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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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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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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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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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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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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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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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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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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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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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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
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Our universities should produce good criticism they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.
Randall Jarrell
