Randall Jarrell Quotes

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

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

Ezra Pound - idiosyncrasy on a monument.

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

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

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.

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?

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.