Quotes by Randall Jarrell

“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.Whe...”

“I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darknessthat the darkness flung meIs worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the dark...”

“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's ugly, but is it art?”

“When I was young and miserable and prettyAnd poor, I'd wishWhat all girls wish: to have a husband,A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wishIs womanish:That the boy putting groceries in my car...”

“Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statue...”

“The cat's asleep; I whisper "kitten"Till he stirs a little and begins to purr--He doesn't wake. Today out on the limb(The limb he thinks he can't climb down from)He mewed until I heard him in the h...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Ezra Pound - idiosyncrasy on a monument.”

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

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

“I see at last that all the knowledgeI 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 da...”

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

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

“Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the worthless...”

“If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and syste...”