Quotes from Randall Jarrell

I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry.

He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.

Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.

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.

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

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.

Ezra Pound - idiosyncrasy on a monument.

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.

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

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

The blind date that has stood you up: your life.

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day.

If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.