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

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Manners, Far

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in 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.

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Obvious, Facts, Like, Forgotten

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Culture, Think, Poetry, Possible, Read

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

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

  Randall Jarrell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Editors, Thinks, Just

• 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

• 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.

Related Authors

• Dean Hughes
• Jamaica Kincaid
• Allison Winn Scotch
• Wally Lamb
• David Levien
• Mil Millington
• Marge Piercy
• James Salter
• Donald E. Westlake
• Joel C. Rosenberg

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 17th April

Births

• 1934 - Barry Humphries
• 1964 - Maynard James Keenan
• 1937 - Kerry Thornley
• 1928 - Victor Lownes
• 1959 - Sean Bean

Deaths

• 2007 - Kitty Carlisle
• 1893 - Lucy Larcom
• 2003 - Robert Atkins
• 1988 - Louise Nevelson
• 1785 - William Whitehead