Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowsh…

- Randall Jarrell

The ways we miss our lives are life.

- Randall Jarrell

If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, an…

- Randall Jarrell

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.

- Randall Jarrell

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

- Randall Jarrell

our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.

- Randall Jarrell

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

- Randall Jarrell

The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.

- Randall Jarrell

Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside…

- Randall Jarrell