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Randall Jarrell Quotes

1914–1965 United States

Randall Jarrell (6 May 1914 – 15 October 1965) was an American poet, novelist, critic, children's book author and essayist.

United States
Aviators
Essayists
Novelists
Poets

Also known as: Jarrell, Randall

Random Randall Jarrell quote

131 quotes

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

Poetry and the Age (1953)

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

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

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

Poetry and the Age (1953)

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

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

If we judge by wealth and power, our times are the best of times; if the times have made us willing to judge by wealth and power, they are the worst of times.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

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

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle.

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

Poetry and the Age (1953)

New Directions is a reviewer’s nightmare; it’s enough punishment to read it all, without writing about it too.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Let’s say this together: “Great me no greats”, and leave this grading to posterity.

Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Who would be such a fool as to make advances to his reader, advances which might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?

Poetry and the Age (1953)

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.

Pictures from an Institution (1954)

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

The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

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

Poetry and the Age (1953)

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

A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

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.

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

The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

A person is a process, one that leads to death...

The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

What Miss Moore’s best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it “comes into and steadies the soul,” so that the reader feels himself “a life prisoner, but reconciled.”

Poetry and the Age (1953)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Randall Jarrell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.