140 Quotes by Randall Jarrell

If I tell you that Mrs. Robbins had bad teeth and looked like a horse, you will laugh at me as a cliché-monger; yet it is the truth. I can do nothing with the teeth; but let me tell you that she looked like a French horse, a dark, Mediterranean, market-type horse that has all its life begrudged to the poor the adhesive-tape on a torn five-franc note - that has tiptoed (to save its shoes) for centuries along that razor-edge where Greed and Caution meet.

When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can’t help feeling, we’d have known that Moby-Dick was a good book—-why, how could anyone help knowing?But suppose someone says to us, “Well, you’re here now: what’s our own Moby-Dick? What’s the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?” What do we say then?

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

Read at whim! Read at whim!

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.

the really damned not only like Hell, they feel loyal to it...

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 blind date that has stood you up: your life.

The ways we miss our lives are life.