Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I still don’t know a better novel than Crime and Punishment — still, every fourt… - Randall Jarrell

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Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I still don’t know a better novel than Crime and Punishment — still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depresses him; besides that, he didn’t believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.

English
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About Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell (6 May 1914 – 15 October 1965) was an American poet, novelist, critic, children's book author and essayist.

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Additional quotes by Randall Jarrell

...“progress”, in poetry at least, comes not so much from digesting the last age as from rejecting it altogether (or, rather, from eating a little and leaving a lot), and...the world’s dialectic is a sort of neo-Hegelian one in which one progresses not by resolving contradictions but by ignoring them.

If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast — and as someone said, “If you’re going to hang me, you mustn’t expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.”

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