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

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

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

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

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.

- Randall Jarrell