Quotes by Randall Jarrell

“When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your o...”

“One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all. I picture to m...”

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

“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.”

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

“Delmore carries such a petty, personally involved, New Yorkish atmosphere around with him it's almost unpleasant for me to see him. He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review...”

“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 t...”

“The nurse is the night To wake to, to die in: and the day I live, The world and its life are her dreams.”

“And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judg...”

“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....”

“For this last savior, man, I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying? Men wash their hands in blood, as best they can: I find no fault in this just man.”

“We read our mail and counted up our missions — In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school — Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had kill...”

“The soul has no assignments, neither cooks Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time. Here in this enclave there are centuries For you to waste: the short and narrow stream Of life meand...”

“The ways we miss our lives are life.”

“Somewhere there must be Something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of — think of me!”

“His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring That leers up, joyless, vile, in meek obscenity — This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleats The herd back to the pit of being.”

“Death and the devil, what are these to him? His being accuses him — and yet his face is firm In resolution, in absolute persistence; The folds of smiling do for steadiness; The face is its own fate...”

“When I was asked to talk about the Obscurity of the Modern Poet I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about th...”

“If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.”

“How poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, Since you won’t read me, I’ll make sure you can’t — is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.”