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Quote by Randall Jarrell

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Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy

This novel employs humor to depict the peculiarities and ironies within a fictional educational setting, offering a critical look at the system and its characters. more

Author

Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell was an influential American poet, born on May 6, 1914, and died on October 14, 1965. His poetry is known for its profound emotion and unique style, considered a significant representative of American poetry in the 20th century. more

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“I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class's teacher, when the class got to Evangeline , kept echoing in my ears: "We're coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don't be babies and start counting the pages." I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages.”

LongDreamGirlClassBoysTeacherBabyBedPagesEarsLaysGradesCountingBoy And GirlEighth Grade
Book:A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables
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“Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.”

WorldWritingHeartSeemsFallWaitingMillionsTelevisionPoetTerribleWestStaringBombsTemporaryDeclineShelterExplosionsRockets
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools; and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you. Similarly, you write true things or good things, and end by thinking things true or good simply because you write them”

PeopleIfsThinkingWritingEndsStrongFoolMetsGood ThingsOppositionPoundsOpposingUnintelligentTrue Things
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“Some of Mr. Gregory's poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker ; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual smartness, the flat fashionable irony, meaningless because it proceeds from a frame of reference whose amorphous superiority is the most definite thing about it they are the trademark not simply of a magazine but of a class.”

ClassMagazinesIronyFlatsMeaninglessDefiniteSuperiorityCasualFashionableNew YorkersTrademarksSmartnessFrame Of Reference
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.”

ThinkingArtSaidLife IsArtistHoursWorstHairNeededSceneArt IsMadMilesIceFortyWorst ThingsFacilityWristsSkatesThink TwiceGliding
Author:Randall Jarrell
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