Quotes from Randall Jarrell

But I identify myself, as always,With something that there's something wrong with,With something human.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

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.

You know what I was,You see what I am: change me, change me!

But be, as you have been, my happiness...

Wisdom, said William James, Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise If that is wisdom.

Really I began the day Not with a man's wish: "May this day be different," But with the birds' wish: "May this day Be the same day, the day of my life.

There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.

A critic] can never forget that all he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses — and yet he must regard that self as no more than the instrument through which the work of art is seen, so that the work of art will seem everything to him and his own self nothing.

The hunter and the mermaid were so different from each other that it seemed to them, finally, that they were exactly alike; and they lived together and were happy.

For a long time, whenever the hunter took off his clothes, she would laugh as if he were playing a trick on her, something magical but ridiculous. He would explain to her how useful and beautiful clothes are; she listened, always, with the same willing doubtful smile. She would have liked to be fooled, but it was more than she could manage; the hunter was the one clothed thing in a naked world.

Here where North, the night, the berg of death Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness, I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness—that the 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.

I have found that Lost World in the Lost and Found Columns whose gray illegible advertisements My soul has memorized world after world: LOST - NOTHING. STRAYED FROM NOWHERE. NO REWARD.

A prose work of some length that has something wrong with it.

Star, that looked so long among the stones And picked from them, half iron and half dirt, One; and bent and put it to her lips And breathed upon it till at last it burned Uncertainly, among the stars its sisters— Breathe on me still, star, sister

Oh, Tatyana, The Angel comes: better to squawk like a chicken Than to say with truth, "But I'm a good girl," And Meet his Challenge with a last firm strange Uncomprehending smile; and—then, then!—see The blind date that has stood you up: your life. (For all this, if it isn't, perhaps, life, Has yet, at least, a language of its own Different from the books'; worse than the books'.) And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.

I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness—that the 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.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

It's ugly, but is it art?

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.