Randall Jarrell Quotes

I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable.

Not till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination"-above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." shall we have it.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

We are always running, and it has become a habit. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war with ourselves, and we can easily start a war with others.

Real sorrow is incompatible with hope. No matter how great that sorrow may be, hope raises it one hundred cubits higher.

Most artists I know consider themselves to be phonies, along with the feeling that there's something that you're doing is essential, essential to communicate, and deeply, deeply real.

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

I'm basically a pretty shy person and I don't dance or get into fights. But there are all these things inside me that get out when I perform. It's like a real world when I play, here I can do all the things that I can't do in real life.

I felt the ruthfulness and senselessness of war so acutlely that I wrote the first three stanzas of which, are in effect a prayer.

I would push for more production and Steve Miller would say, "Why do you want to have more production when you have real songs? You don't want to cover up the song."

There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

In the practice of art... it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry... may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor - the real labor of thinking.

A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.

The only real failure is trying to second-guess the taste of an audience. Nothing comes out of that except a kind of inward humiliation.

I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they

I think writing kind of burns out the flaming question. Sometimes it might feel like when you're living with certain paradoxes and they're unarticulated, you feel pressure to choose. I feel more comfortable living in the paradoxes that I've named and laid out, whereas when I started they might have felt like real agitations. At least I see them more clearly after having sketched them for myself and made a place to stand in relationship to them that felt okay enough to last through the course of a book.

Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time. ~The Kreutzer Sonata

There is no holy life. There is no war between good and evil. There is no sin and no redemption. None of these things matter to the real you. But they all matter hugely to the false you, the one who believes in the separate self. You have tried to take your separate self, with all its loneliness and anxiety and pride, to the door of enlightenment. But it will never go through, because it is a ghost.

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

It's a real comfort zone for me to feel alien.

Everything that's love can't be fear, and everything that's fear can't be love. You're either in one or the other. Almost every time you turn on the television set, you're in fear. You get aligned with fear. When you're aligned with fear, instead of with God-consciousness, you just keep attracting more fear-more stuff to be afraid of, more shortages, revenge, anger, wars, killing, and disease.

Yes, I dont know why, but I have never been disappointed, and I often was in the early days, without feeling at the same time, or a moment later, an undeniable relief.

To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.

I'm not limited by genre and it doesn't really matter what the genre is as long as the film is going to be new and have some real artistic integrity.

Whenever you are able, have a "look" inside yourself to see whether you are unconsciously creating conflict between the inner and the outer, between your external circumstances at that moment - where you are, who you are with, or what you are doing - and your thoughts and feelings. Can you feel how painful it is to internally stand in opposition to what is? When you recognize this, you also realize that you are now free to give up this futile conflict, this inner state of war.