Randall Jarrell

“I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me— Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain.”

“He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.”

“I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.”

“If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.”

“More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.”

“One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.”

“The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.”

“A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”