Randall Jarrell Quotes
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
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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 kno . . . Read more

-Randall Jarrell
Read at whim! read at whim!

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

-Randall Jarrell
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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.

-Randall Jarrell
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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.

-Randall Jarrell
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All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone.

-Randall Jarrell
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A poet is a person who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times.

-Randall Jarrell
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