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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.

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
Read
Wish
Stories
Would
Beggars
Beggar
Wishes

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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 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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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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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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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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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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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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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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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The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
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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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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote 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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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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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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If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
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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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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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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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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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