Quotes by Randall Jarrell
To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.
I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.
The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future became one of red clay pine barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.
He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
But be, as you have been, my happiness...
It is like any other work of art. It is and never can be changed. Behind everything there is always The unknown unwanted life.
The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school—...
They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities. It was not dying—no, not ever dying;...
But really no one is exceptional, No one has anything, I'm anybody,...
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
It was not dying: everybody died.
We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.
I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me— Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,...
The head withdraws into its hatch (a boy's), The engines rise to their blind laboring roar,...
