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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
Dark
Family
Life
Humblest
World
Uneasy
Fail
Succeed
Failing
Greatest

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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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When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
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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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The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
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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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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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The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
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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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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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The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small whole species disappear and are replaced.
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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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One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
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If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
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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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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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The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Randall Jarrell
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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.
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Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
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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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there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
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