Randall Jarrell Quotes

• Is an institution always a man’s shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

  Randall Jarrell

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• You Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause.

  Randall Jarrell

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• It’s better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.

  Randall Jarrell

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• She looked at me the way you’d look at a chessman if it made its own move.

  Randall Jarrell

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• President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.

  Randall Jarrell

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• A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.

  Randall Jarrell

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• 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.

  Randall Jarrell

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• I felt quite funny when Freud died. It was like having a continent disappear.

  Randall Jarrell

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• The blind date that has stood you up: your life.

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Life

• 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 Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• 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.

  Randall Jarrell

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  Tags in European, Decided, American, Women, Like, Matters

• It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Better, Rest, Idea, Live

• He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Editors, Thinks, Just

• 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.

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Obvious, Facts, Like, Forgotten

• 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.

  Randall Jarrell

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  Tags in Culture, Think, Poetry, Possible, Read

• In the United States, there one feels free… Except from the Americans – but every pearl has its oyster.

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Except, United, Feels

• To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Manners, Far

• If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren’t like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Meet, Politician, Like

• The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Age, Funny

Randall Jarrell (19)

Birth:	6th May, 1914
Death:	14th October, 1965
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Poet

About

Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, novelist, and the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate.

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