Randall Jarrell Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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We never step twice into the same Auden.—HERACLITUS

Randall Jarrell
We are all—so to speak—intellectuals about something.

Randall Jarrell
As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.

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

Randall Jarrell
You know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!

Randall Jarrell
... the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.

Randall Jarrell
A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.

Randall Jarrell
... whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.

Randall Jarrell
... the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it...

Randall Jarrell
[W. H.] Auden has gone in the right direction, and a great deal too far.

Randall Jarrell
... a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...

Randall Jarrell
... in this world, often, there is nothing to praise but no one to blame...

Randall Jarrell
... there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.

Randall Jarrell
... to Americans English manners are far more frightening than none at all...

Randall Jarrell
Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.

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

Randall Jarrell
It is rare for a novel to have an ending as good as its middle and beginning...

Randall Jarrell
Let's say this together: Great me no greats, and leave this grading to posterity.

Randall Jarrell
Poets are in the beginning hypotheses, in the middle facts, and in the end values.

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

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

Randall Jarrell
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.

Randall Jarrell
Be, as you have been, my happiness;
Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon.

Randall Jarrell
When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.

Randall Jarrell
... modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can't get it, let him eat Browning...

Randall Jarrell
The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

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

Randall Jarrell
... just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.

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

Randall Jarrell
Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did.

Randall Jarrell