Quotes by Randall Jarrell

About Randall Jarrell:

Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, novelist, and the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Randall Jarrell

She helped the hunter with the cooking as a husband helps his wife: when he had gone out to hunt and left something to stew, she would take the pot off the fire. But she never knew when to take it off; sometimes it was cooked to pieces, and she never...

Randall Jarrell

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 statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems....

Randall Jarrell

It's ugly, but is it art?

Randall Jarrell

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

Randall Jarrell

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.

Randall Jarrell

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

Randall Jarrell

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

Randall Jarrell

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

Randall Jarrell

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.

Randall Jarrell

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

Randall Jarrell

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.

Randall Jarrell

All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone.

Randall Jarrell

The tags' chain stirs with the wind; and I sleep Paid, dead, and a soldier. Who fights for his own life Loses, loses: I have killed for my world, and am free.

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. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a ...

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

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

Randall Jarrell

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.

Randall Jarrell

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.

Randall Jarrell

Author Bio

  • NameRandall Jarrell
  • Descriptionpoet, critic, novelist, essayist
  • BornMay 6, 1914
  • DiedOctober 14, 1965
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Writer
  • WorksPictures From An Institution
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; National Book Award