Quotes from Randall Jarrell

Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.

A poet is a person who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times.

When I was young and miserable and pretty And poor, I'd wish What all girls wish: to have a husband, A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish Is womanish: That the boy putting groceries in my car See me.

The days went by for him, all different and all the same. The boy was happy, and yet he didn't know that he was happy, exactly: he couldn't remember having been unhappy. If one day as he played at the edge of the forest some talking bird had flown down and asked him: "Do you like your life" he would not have known what to say, but would have asked the bird: "Can you not like it?

The tags' chain stirs with the wind; and I sleep Paid, dead, and a soldier. Who fights for his own life Loses, loses: I have killed for my world, and am free.

I see at least that all 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.

If I tell you that Mrs. Robbins had bad teeth and looked like a horse, you will laugh at me as a cliché-monger; yet it is the truth. I can do nothing with the teeth; but let me tell you that she looked like a French horse, a dark, Mediterranean, market-type horse that has all its life begrudged to the poor the adhesive-tape on a torn five-franc note - that has tiptoed (to save its shoes) for centuries along that razor-edge where Greed and Caution meet.

when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows", he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

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.

We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

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.

A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.

our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.

Read at whim! Read at whim!

The ways we miss our lives are life.

We can't tell our life from our wish

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

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.

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.

The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.