Randall Jarrell

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Randall Jarrell (May 6, 1914 - October 15, 1965), was a United States author, writer and poet.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

But be, as you have been, my happiness...

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

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

The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future 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.

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.

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

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

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