Top 60 Randall Jarrell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The ways we miss our lives are life.”

— Randall Jarrell

2. “You give me the feeling that the universe Was made by something more than human For something less than human. But I identify myself, as always, With something that there’s something wrong with, With something human.”

— Randall Jarrell

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

— Randall Jarrell

4. “A person is a process, one that leads to death...”

— Randall Jarrell

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

— Randall Jarrell

6. “Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.”

— Randall Jarrell

7. “The dark, uneasy world of family life – where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.”

— Randall Jarrell

8. “Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.”

— Randall Jarrell

9. “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

10. “Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.”

— Randall Jarrell

11. “Read at whim! Read at whim!”

— Randall Jarrell

12. “Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day.”

— Randall Jarrell

13. “Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.”

— Randall Jarrell

14. “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

15. “We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.”

— Randall Jarrell

16. “If you’ve been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.”

— Randall Jarrell

17. “Most people don’t listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By...”

— Randall Jarrell

18. “Say what you like, but such things do happen – not often, but they do happen.”

— Randall Jarrell

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

— Randall Jarrell

20. “If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won’t that make a true and beautiful poem? One’s heart tells one that it will; and one’s heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus .”

— Randall Jarrell

21. “A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.”

— Randall Jarrell

22. “And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judgment of the world.”

— Randall Jarrell

23. “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

24. “The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.”

— Randall Jarrell

25. “The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.”

— Randall Jarrell

26. “Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.”

— Randall Jarrell

27. “The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.”

— Randall Jarrell

28. “Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.”

— Randall Jarrell

29. “It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.”

— Randall Jarrell

30. “We can’t tell our life from our wish.”

— Randall Jarrell

31. “One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that “the way it really was” half the time is, and half the time isn’t, the way it ought to be in the novel.”

— Randall Jarrell

32. “People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others...”

— Randall Jarrell

33. “I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness – that 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

34. “I simply don’t want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry.”

— Randall Jarrell

35. “To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.”

— Randall Jarrell

36. “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

37. “Christina Stead has a Chinese say, “Our old age is perhaps life’s decision about us” or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.”

— Randall Jarrell

38. “The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not satiric for the very best reasons.”

— Randall Jarrell

39. “Except from the Americans – but every pearl has its oyster.”

— Randall Jarrell

40. “When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.”

— Randall Jarrell

41. “One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.”

— Randall Jarrell

42. “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

43. “Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.”

— Randall Jarrell

44. “We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn’t arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along...”

— Randall Jarrell

45. “The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.”

— Randall Jarrell

46. “The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude’s voice, 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.”

— Randall Jarrell

47. “When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.”

— Randall Jarrell

48. “Doesn’t the world need the painter’s praise anymore?”

— Randall Jarrell

49. “If wishes were stories, beggars would read...”

— Randall Jarrell

50. “If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.”

— Randall Jarrell