"When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in."
Randall Jarrell jə-REL was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
"We read our mail and counted up our missions — In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school — Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, "Our casualties were low." They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities."
"Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself."
"Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say "perhaps" or "I dont know," so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him."
"Delmore carries such a petty, personally involved, New Yorkish atmosphere around with him its almost unpleasant for me to see him. He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors."
"Goethe said, “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: “I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.” These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds."
"The nurse is the night To wake to, to die in: and the day I live, The world and its life are her dreams."