“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 its 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 Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/707.html, complete poem
Little Friend, Little Friend (1945)
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Randall Jarrell 215
poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965Related quotes
Variant: I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.
Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story
The Yellow Book, 1974
Context: Q: Did you start life like us with lots of demands, and what spurred you to give it up? A: When I was six or seven, I would feel I was inside a box of earth and sky, and I would weep. Once I asked my mother: "Take me out of this box of earth and sky." She said, "I can't." Then I said, "I'm going." (p.33)
“I often got a belt from my mother with a wet dish cloth for kicking a ball through a window.”
A disagreement with Oisín McConville over the best gifts to give loved ones at half-time during the 2020 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship Final. Quoted in The Irish Times https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/gaelic-football/tv-view-dublin-look-towards-seventh-heaven-as-mayo-s-hell-lingers-on-1.4441949 in December 2020
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss
Context: I will not say that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines that I am about to set forth are those which make me live; but I will venture to say that it is my longing to live and to live for ever that inspires these doctrines within me. And if by means of them I succeed in strengthening and sustaining this same longing in another, perhaps when it is all but dead, then I shall have performed a man's work, and above all, I shall have lived. In a word, be it with reason or without reason or against reason, I am resolved not to die. And if, when at last I die out, I die altogether, then I shall not have died out of myself — that is, I shall not have yielded myself to death, but my human destiny shall have killed me. Unless I come to lose my head, or rather my heart, I will not abdicate from life — life will be wrested from me.
"Loyalty Song"
Lyrics and poetry