Randall Jarrell > Quotes

“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”
― Randall Jarell

“When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can’t help feeling, we’d have known that Moby-Dick was a good book—-why, how could anyone help knowing?

But suppose someone says to us, “Well, you’re here now: what’s our own Moby-Dick? What’s the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?” What do we say then?”
― Randall Jarrell, The Third Book of Criticism

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

“The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.”
― Randall Jarrell

“It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.”
― Randall Jarrell

“All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone.”
― Randall Jarrell

“The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means—that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives; but duringthe contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence, Read at whim! read at whim!”
― Randall Jarrell

“The ways we miss our lives are life.”
― Randall Jarrell, The Seven League Crutches

“How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I'm anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.”
― Randall Jarell

“I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.”
― Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems

“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 the 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.”
― Randall Jarrell

“Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.”
― Randall Jarrell

“Someties it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them.

In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art:. it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write - a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are!

When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry.”
― Randall Jarrell, Kipling, Auden and Co.: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964

“It's ugly, but is it art?”
― Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

“The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”
― Randall Jarrrell

“Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day.”
― Randall Jarrell

“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.”
― Randall Jarrell, No Other Book: Selected Essays

“When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I'd wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car

See me. ”
― Randall Jarrell, Selected Poems

“A poet is a person who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times.”
― Randall Jarrell

“The days went by for him, all different and all the same. The boy was happy, and yet he didn't know that he was happy, exactly: he couldn't remember having been unhappy. If one day as he played at the edge of the forest some talking bird had flown down and asked him: "Do you like your life" he would not have known what to say, but would have asked the bird: "Can you not like it?”
― Randall Jarrell, The Animal Family: A Newbery Honor Award Winner

“The tags' chain stirs with the wind; and I sleep
Paid, dead, and a soldier. Who fights for his own life
Loses, loses: I have killed for my world, and am free.”
― Randall Jarrell

“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 winter
And not just entropy, the universe
Plunging at last into its cold decline?
I cannot think of him without a pang.
Poor rumpled thing, why don't you see
That you have no more, really, than a man?
Men aren't happy; why are you?”
― Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems

“The moon rises. The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm's white wisp of smoke.
A spark burns, high in heaven.
Deer thread the blossoming rows
Of the old orchard, rabbits
Hop by the well-curb. The cock crows
From the tree by the widow's walk;
Two stars in the trees to the west,
Are snared, and an owl's soft cry
Runs like a breath through the forest.
Here too, though death is hushed, though joy
Obscures, like night, their wars,
The beings of this world are swept
By the Strife that moves the stars.”
― Randall Jarrell

“Before the bat could answer, the mockingbird exclaimed angrily: "You sound as if there were something wrong with imitating things!"

"Oh no," the bat said.

"Well then, you sound as if there something wrong with driving them off. It's my territory, isn't it? If you can't drive things off your own territory what can you do?"

The bat didn't know what to say; after a minute the chipmunk said uneasily, "He just meant it's odd to drive them all off and then imitate them so well too."

"Odd!" cried the mockingbird. "Odd! If I didn't it really would be odd. Did you ever hear of a mockingbird that didn't?"

The bat said politely, "No indeed. No, it's just what mockingbirds do do. That's really why I made up the poem about it--I admire mockingbirds so much, you know."

The chipmunk said, "He talks about them all the time."

"A mockingbird's sensitive," said the mockingbird; when he said sensitive his voice went way up and way back down. "They get on my nerves. You just don't understand how much they get on my nerves. Sometimes I think if I can't get rid of them I'll go crazy."

"If they didn't get on your nerves so, maybe you wouldn't be able to imitate them so well, the chipmunk said in a helpful, hopeful voice.”
― Randall Jarrell, The Bat-Poet

“It is always difficult for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend, but because their poems are bad.”
― Randall Jarell

“If I tell you that Mrs. Robbins had bad teeth and looked like a horse, you will laugh at me as a cliché-monger; yet it is the truth. I can do nothing with the teeth; but let me tell you that she looked like a French horse, a dark, Mediterranean, market-type horse that has all its life begrudged to the poor the adhesive-tape on a torn five-franc note - that has tiptoed (to save its shoes) for centuries along that razor-edge where Greed and Caution meet.”
― Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

“I see at least that all knowledge I wrung from the darkness-- that the darkness flung me-- is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, the darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness and we call it wisdom. It is pain.”
― Randall Jarrell

“One day is one wave, and the next day the next, for the sea people―and whether they're glad or whether they're sorry, the sea washes it away. When my sister died, the next day I'd forgotten and was happy. But if you died, if he died, my heart would break.

When it storms for the people, no matter how terribly it storms, the storm isn't real―swim down a few strokes and it's calm there, down there it's always calm. And death is not different, if it's someone else who dies. We say. 'Swim away from it'; we swim away from everything.

But on land it's different. The storm's real here, and the red leaves, and the branches when they're bare all winter. It all changes and never stops changing, and I'm here with nowhere to swim to, no way ever to leave it or forget it. No, the land's better! The land's better!”
― Randall Jarrell, The Animal Family

“Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.”
― Randall Jarrell

“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.”
― Randall Jarrell