...we like somebody who succeeds with such bad conscience, and who seems to wish that he had the nerve to be a failure or, better still, something to which the terms success and failure don’t apply — as when Mallory said, about Everest: “Success is meaningless here.”

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

More quotes by Randall Jarrell

Poetry and the Age (1953)

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

Poetry and the Age (1953)

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

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

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Randall Jarrell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.