Randall Jarrell Quotes

When I was young and miserable and prettyAnd poor, I'd wishWhat all girls wish: to have a husband,A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wishIs womanish:That the boy putting groceries in my carSee me.

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. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader and would no more read a book alone if they could help it than have a baby alone.

Ezra Pound - idiosyncrasy on a monument.

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

It's ugly, but is it art?

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

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 hose.

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

The cat's asleep; I whisper "kitten"Till he stirs a little and begins to purr--He doesn't wake. Today out on the limb(The limb he thinks he can't climb down from)He mewed until I heard him in the house.I climbed up to get him down: he mewed.What he says and what he sees are limited.My own response is even more constricted.I think, "It's lucky; what you have is too."What do you have except--well, me?I joke about it but it's not a joke;The house and I are all he remembers.Next month how will he guess that it is winterAnd not just entropy, the universePlunging at last into its cold decline?I cannot think of him without a pang.Poor rumpled thing, why don't you seeThat you have no more, really, than a man?Men aren't happy; why are you?

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.

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

I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darknessAnd we call it wisdom. It is pain.

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