140 Quotes by Randall Jarrell

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.

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.

Many poets...write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

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.

Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.

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

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

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

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.