Carolina QuotesIf we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say that they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politician stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
"The Intellectual in America" (1955), from A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962)
- year
- 1955
Cite this record
“If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-09C0A3C92A. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/09c0a3c92a
More from Randall Jarrell
The poets of the last generation were extremely erudite, but their erudition was of the rather specialized type that passed as currency of the realm in a somewhat literary realm. About Darwin, Marx, Freud and Co., about all characteristically “scientific” or “modern” thinkers most of them concluded regretfully: “If they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to ignore them.” (Or deplore them.)
You often feel about something in Shakespeare or Dostoevsky that nobody ever said such a thing, but it's just the sort of thing people would say if they could — is more real, in some sense, than what people do say. If you have given your imagination free rein, let things go as far as they want to go, the world they made for themselves while you watched can have, for you and later watchers, a spontaneous finality.
Animals, these beings trapped As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap, Aging, but without knowledge of their age, Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death — Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!The world goes by my cage and never sees me.