Randall Jarrell Quotes

Is an institution always a man’s shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

You Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause.

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

She looked at me the way you’d look at a chessman if it made its own move.

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

A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.

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.

I felt quite funny when Freud died. It was like having a continent disappear.