Carolina QuotesThe greatest American industry — why has no one ever said so? — is the industry of using words. We pay tens of millions of people to spend their lives lying to us, or telling us the truth, or supplying us with a nourishing medicinal compound of the two. All of us are living in the middle of a dark wood — a bright Technicolored forest — of words, words, words. It is a forest in which the wind is never still: there isn’t a tree in the forest that is not, for every moment of its life and our lives, persuading or ordering or seducing or overawing us into buying this, believing that, voting for the other.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“The Taste of the Age”, pp. 27–28
- work
- A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
- year
- 1962
- locator
- pp. 27–28
Cite this record
“The greatest American industry — why has no one ever said so…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-12CE864EAC. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/12ce864eac
More from 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.
Many a writer has spent his life putting his favorite words in all the places they belong; but how many, like [E.E.] Cummings, have spent their lives putting their favorite words in all the places they don’t belong, thus discovering many effects that no one had even realized were possible?
A farmer is separated from a farmer By what farmers have in common: forests, Those dark things — what the fields were to begin with. At night a fox comes out of the forest, eats his chickens. At night the deer come out of the forest, eat his crops.