Randall Jarrell Quotes

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.

- Randall Jarrell

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

- Randall Jarrell

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

- Randall Jarrell

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.

- Randall Jarrell

He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.

- Randall Jarrell

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.

- Randall Jarrell

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

- Randall Jarrell

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

- 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.

- Randall Jarrell

The blind date that has stood you up: your life.

- Randall Jarrell

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

- Randall Jarrell