“…a [literary] style can be a whole way of existing, so that you exist, for the moment, in perfect sympathy with it: you don’t read it so much as listen to it as it sweeps you along—fast enough, often, to make you feel a blurred pleasure in your own speed. Often a phrase or sentence has the uncaring unconscious authority—how else could you say it?—that only a real style has.”

—  Randall Jarrell

“An Unread Book”, p. 36
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

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Randall Jarrell 215
poet, critic, novelist, essayist 1914–1965

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