Randall Jarrell - Man Quotes

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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 myself that reader — that non-reader, rather; one man out of every two — and I reflect, with shame: "Our poems are too hard for him." But so, too, are Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, pornographic novels — any book whatsoever.

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

Randall Jarrell
... 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.

Randall Jarrell
Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.

Randall Jarrell
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 — a man does what he must —
And the body underneath it says: I am.

Randall Jarrell
The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas—the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, That was a good stroke.

Randall Jarrell
An intelligent man said that the world felt Napoleon as a weight, and that when he died it would give a great oof of relief. This is just as true of Byron, or of such Byrons of their days as Kipling and Hemingway: after a generation or two the world is tired of being their pedestal, shakes them of with an oof, and then—hoisting onto its back a new world-figure—feels the penetrating satisfaction of having made a mistake all its own.

Randall Jarrell
That most human and American of presidents—of Americans—Abraham Lincoln, said as a young man: The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read. It's a hard heart, and a dull one, that doesn't go out to that sentence. The man who will make us see what we haven't seen, feel what we haven't felt, understand what we haven't understood—he is our best friend. And if he knows more than we do, that is an invitation to us, not an indictment of us. And it is not an indictment of him, either; it takes all sorts of people to make a world—to make, even, a United States of America.

Randall Jarrell
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.

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

Randall Jarrell
Once man was tossed about helplessly and incessantly by the wind that blew through him—now the toughest of all plants is more sensitive, more easily moved than he. In other words, death is better than life, nothing is better than anything. Nor is this a silly adolescent pessimism peculiar to Housman, as so many critics assure you. It is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born—said a poet approvingly advertised as seeing life steadily and seeing it whole; and if I began an anthology of such quotations there it would take me a long time to finish. The attitude is obviously inadequate and just as obviously important.

Randall Jarrell
If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast—and as someone said, If you're going to hang me, you mustn't expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.

Randall Jarrell
... man is the animal that moralizes. Man is also the animal that complains about being one, and says that there is an animal, a beast inside him—that he is brother to dragons. (He is certainly a brother to wolves, and to pandas too, but he is father to dragons, not brother: they, like many gods and devils, are inventions of his.)

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 eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.

Randall Jarrell
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.

Randall Jarrell
A man on a park bench has a lonely final look, as if to say: Reduce humanity to its ultimate particles and you end here; beyond this single separate being you cannot go. But if you look back into his life you cannot help seeing that he is separated off, not separate—is a later, singular stage of an earlier plural being. All the tongues of men were baby talk to begin with: go back far enough and which of us knew where he ended and Mother and Father and Brother and Sister began? The singular subject in its objective universe has evolved from that orginal composite entity—half subjective, half objective, having its own ways and laws and language, its own life and its own death—the family.

Randall Jarrell
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 judgment of the world.

Randall Jarrell