RANDALL JARRELL

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

If you have been put in your place long enough, you begin to act like the place.

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.

We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.

if sometimes we are bogged down in lines full of "corybulous", "hypogeum", "plangent", "irrefragably", "glozening", "tellurian", "conclamant", sometimes we are caught up in the soaring rapture of something unprecedented, absolutely individual.

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

most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War.

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.

Habits are happiness of a sort...

Goethe said, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing"; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: "I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary." These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.

In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.

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.

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.

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.