Randall Jarrell

“It's ugly, but is it art?”

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

“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.”

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

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

“From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from the 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.”

“I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darknessAnd we call it wisdom. It is pain.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When I was young and miserable and prettyAnd poor, I'd wishWhat all girls wish: to have a husband,A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wishIs womanish:That the boy putting groceries in my carSee me.”

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

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