Randall Jarrell

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

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

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.

My feeling for reality TV isn't ironic, guilty, or apologetic. Reality TV is one of the few remaining modes of popular entertainment in which characterization is permitted as plot.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.