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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.

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
Makes
Reality
Wanting

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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.
Randall Jarrell
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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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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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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.
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
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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.
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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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell
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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
Randall Jarrell
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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
Randall Jarrell
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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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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.
Randall Jarrell
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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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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
Randall Jarrell
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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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Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
Randall Jarrell