Randall Jarrell Quotes

Seeing my parents makes me realise that life is not a fairy tale.

I'm interested in how innocence fares when it collides with hard reality.

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I've thought a great deal about my life and my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out.

As a child, I thought, 'Once I am a grown-up, there will be no more fear, no more worries,' and it turns out that's not true.

I started out with this 'La Boheme' fantasy, but as you get older, the 'La Boheme' fantasy becomes less sexy, believe me.

You spend your childhood wanting to get out from your house and wanting to get away and out into the real world, and then as adults, we start to learn that things are not what we thought they were.

Back when I was an idealistic 18-year-old on my way to Chicago, I might have believed that being on the side of virtue would guarantee a good outcome. These many years later, I know better.

Growing up is mostly the process of having to acknowledge the differences between your world and the whole world.

I've got enough miles under my belt to know that whatever you envision in your mind, even if it comes true, will only keep a shape in the most general way.

I had this fantasy vision of what a career as a musician was like. And then I grew up and actually got in the business and realized, it doesn't often work that way.

It's cold water in the face to realize you're not nearly as special and as unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager.

The bleakness of what faces us is difficult to swallow. As long as we engage in happy platitudes and a false kind of vision of the possible, it may empower you over the short term, but it is eventually, because of the reality in front of us, going to lead to despair and cynicism and apathy. It's better to swallow hard the bitter pill of what we're up against.

The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.

All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter's ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age.

Life is never quite like the brochure.

He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality

But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.

Why is everyone trying to tell me that when you get older it gets better?

Everything is so dreamy when you are young. After you grow up it kind of becomes -- just real.

Gone is the blinding glow in his hands - gone, too, is the illusion of purity and beauty! In it's place all that remains is mind-numbing, spine-chilling reality!

When I was a young student, I thought grow-ups would come and make things work. Now I realize that grown-ups are just kids with wrinkles.

I want to be simple. I think that we try - and we think when we grow up - that we have the truth, because we experience and stuff. But that bullsh*t actually.

Apparently, the world is not a wish granting factory.

One of the oddest things about being grown-up was looking back at something you thought you knew and finding out the truth of it was completely different from what you had always believed. (Bone Crossed)

No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.