Randall Jarrell: Trending quotes

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Randall Jarrell: 430 quotes1 like

“We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life — in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us access — unwillingly accuses our lives.”

Randall Jarrell

"The Profession of Poetry," Partisan Review (September/October 1950) [p. 166]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“…“progress”, in poetry at least, comes not so much from digesting the last age as from rejecting it altogether (or, rather, from eating a little and leaving a lot), and…the world’s dialectic is a sort of neo-Hegelian one in which one progresses not by resolving contradictions but by ignoring them.”

Randall Jarrell

“From That Island”, p. 30
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“When we read what Goethe says about men we are ashamed of what we have said; when we read what he says about painting and statues we are ashamed of what Goethe has said.”

Randall Jarrell

“Malraux and the Statues at Bamberg”, p. 194
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I still don’t know a better novel than Crime and Punishment—still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depresses him; besides that, he didn’t believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.”

Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 50
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him. He clings to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting —
Her baby hangs on underneath.”

Randall Jarrell

"A bat is born," lines 1-31; reprinted as "Bats" in The Lost World (1965)
The Bat-Poet (1964)

“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.”

Randall Jarrell

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, pp. 332–333
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 8

“Somewhere there must be
Something that's different from everything.
All that I've never thought of — think of me!”

Randall Jarrell

"A Sick Child," lines 18-20
The Seven-League Crutches (1951)

“The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.”

Randall Jarrell

"A Sad Heart at the Supermarket," Daedalus, vol. 89, no. 2 (Spring 1960); published in A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962)
General sources

“If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you guilty.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 5, p. 220

“Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle, on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair—holding his wrists like Lifar—and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.”

Randall Jarrell

“Poetry, Unlimited”, p. 159
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“It is ugly ducklings, grown either into swans or into remarkably big, remarkably ugly ducks, who are responsible for most works of art; and yet how few of these give a truthful account of what it was like to be an ugly duckling!—it is almost as if the grown, successful swan had repressed most of the memories of the duckling’s miserable, embarrassing, magical beginnings. (The memories are deeply humiliating in two ways: they remind the adult that he was once more ignorant and gullible and emotional than he is; and they remind him that he once was, potentially, far more than he is.)”

Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 19
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“…the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.”

Randall Jarrell

of The Listening Landscape by Marya Zaturenska; “Town Mouse, Country Mouse”, p. 69
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“When we look at the age in which we live—no matter what age it happens to be—it is hard for us not to be depressed by it. The taste of the age is, always, a bitter one. “What kind of a time is this when one must envy the dead and buried!” said Goethe about his age; yet Matthew Arnold would have traded his own time for Goethe’s almost as willingly as he would have traded his own self for Goethe’s. How often, after a long day witnessing elementary education, School Inspector Arnold came home, sank into what I hope was a Morris chair, looked ’round him at the Age of Victoria, that Indian Summer of the Western World, and gave way to a wistful, exacting, articulate despair!
Do people feel this way because our time is worse than Arnold’s, and Arnold’s than Goethe’s, and so on back to Paradise? Or because forbidden fruits—the fruits forbidden to us by time—are always the sweetest? Or because we can never compare our own age with an earlier age, but only with books about that age?
We say that somebody doesn’t know what he is missing; Arnold, pretty plainly, didn’t know what he was having. The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. Maybe we too are living in a Golden or, anyway, Gold-Plated Age, and the people of the future will look back at us and say ruefully: “We never had it so good.” And yet the thought that they will say this isn’t as reassuring as it might be. We can see that Goethe’s and Arnold’s ages weren’t as bad as Goethe and Arnold thought them: after all, they produced Goethe and Arnold. In the same way, our times may not be as bad as we think them: after all, they have produced us. Yet this too is a thought that isn’t as reassuring as it might be.”

Randall Jarrell

“The Taste of the Age”. pp. 16–17; opening
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“We were given drinks, and drank them, and talked while we drank them. But talked, here, is a euphemism: we had that conversation about how you make a Martini. The people in Hell, Dr. Rosenbaum had told me once, say nothing but What? Americans in Hell tell each other how to make Martinis.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 2: “The Whittakers and Gertrude”, p. 40

“Once man was tossed about helplessly and incessantly by the wind that blew through him—now the toughest of all plants is more sensitive, more easily moved than he. In other words, death is better than life, nothing is better than anything. Nor is this a silly adolescent pessimism peculiar to Housman, as so many critics assure you. It is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born—said a poet approvingly advertised as seeing life steadily and seeing it whole; and if I began an anthology of such quotations there it would take me a long time to finish. The attitude is obviously inadequate and just as obviously important.”

Randall Jarrell

“Texts from Housman”, p. 27
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

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

Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 25
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“The greatest American industry—why has no one ever said so?—is the industry of using words. We pay tens of millions of people to spend their lives lying to us, or telling us the truth, or supplying us with a nourishing medicinal compound of the two. All of us are living in the middle of a dark wood—a bright Technicolored forest—of words, words, words. It is a forest in which the wind is never still: there isn’t a tree in the forest that is not, for every moment of its life and our lives, persuading or ordering or seducing or overawing us into buying this, believing that, voting for the other.”

Randall Jarrell

“The Taste of the Age”, pp. 27–28
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

“We never step twice into the same Auden.—HERACLITUS”

Randall Jarrell

“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, p. 115; epigraph
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“[Alexander North] Whitehead is supposed to have said of [Bertrand] Russell: “Bertie thinks me muddleheaded and I think Bertie simple-minded.””

Randall Jarrell

“The Morality of Mr. Winters”, p. 18
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)