140 Quotes by Randall Jarrell

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...

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

We can’t tell our life from our wish.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.