140 Quotes by Randall Jarrell

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.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. From my mother's sleep, I fell into the State, and I hunched in its belly until my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

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.

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

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

We are all so to speak intellectuals about something.

Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody's hair stand on end; he is always crying: "But he hasn't any clothes on!" about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.

Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus .