Randall Jarrell Quotes

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

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

The ways we miss our lives are life.

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

If wishes were stories, beggars would read.

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

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

most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War.

Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.

We can't tell our life from our wish

If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.

We are all so to speak intellectuals about something.

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

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

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

Read at whim! Read at whim!

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

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

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

You give me the feeling that the universe Was made by something more than human For something less than human. But I identify myself, as always, With something that there's something wrong with, With something human.

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.

Christina Stead has a Chinese say, "Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us" or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.