Randall Jarrell Quotes

It would be terribly boring to be earnest.

And I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States.

My hometown was so dull that one time the tide went out and never came back.

When the life is monotonous , even grief is a welcome event.

When I notice that all the beats sound exactly the same, it starts to wear on me.

The most boring thing in the entire world is nudity. The second most boring thing is honesty.

My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom.

Is it life, I ask, is it even prudence, To bore thyself and bore the students?

I could call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.

Nothing is as boring as other people's dreams.

The bore is good for promoting sleep; but though he causeth sleep in others, it is uncertain whether he ever sleeps himself; as few can keep awake in his company long enough to see. It is supposed that when he sleeps it is with his mouth open.

I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!

Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.

How slow and still the time did drag along.

Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.

I don't need to be told the same thing every day, every morning, same words.

I am the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit.

I'm bored by repeating myself, and I would imagine that an audience would be bored by me repeating myself.

The long mechanic pacings to and fro, The set, gray life, and apathetic end.

his voice was centuries old

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

Painting bores me like everything else. Unfortunately, painting is one of the activities - it is bound up in the series of activities - that seems to change almost nothing in life, the same habits are always recurring.

The same old thing--even if it's champagne--is still the same old thing.

If I were well behaved, I'd die of boredom.

You yourself must know how boring gravity is to oneself and everyone else.