...one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common… - Randall Jarrell

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...one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room.

Randall Jarrell

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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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W. H. Auden Robertson Davies Martin Amis Robert Graves William Carlos Williams

Additional quotes by Randall Jarrell

...when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as “a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows”, he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.

...we like somebody who succeeds with such bad conscience, and who seems to wish that he had the nerve to be a failure or, better still, something to which the terms success and failure don’t apply — as when Mallory said, about Everest: “Success is meaningless here.”

One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that “the way it really was” half the time is, and half the time isn’t, the way it ought to be in the novel.

...one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in tha… - Randall Jarrell

About Randall Jarrell

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