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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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Randall Jarrell
Age: 51 †
Born: 1914
Born: May 6
Died: 1965
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Nashville
Tennessee
Life
Humblest
World
Uneasy
Fail
Succeed
Failing
Greatest
Dark
Family

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

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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.
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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
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A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
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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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Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
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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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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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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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 best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not satiric for the very best reasons.
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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad... one suffers through the many for the few.
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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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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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Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
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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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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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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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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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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