Carolina QuotesOne of the most obvious facts about grown-ups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
"An Unread Book," introduction to The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (Holt, Rinehart, 1965 edition)
- year
- 1965
Cite this record
“One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups to a child is …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-193C63E909. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/193c63e909
More from Randall Jarrell
Once, along with The Transfigured Night, he played a class Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead. Most of the class had not seen the painting, so he went to the library and returned with a reproduction of it. Then he pointed, with a sober smile, to a painting which hung on the wall of the classroom (A Representation of Several Areas, Some of Them Grey, one might have called it; yet this would have been unjust to it — it was non-representational) and played for the class, on the piano, a composition which he said was an interpretation of the painting: he played very slowly and very calmly, with his elbows, so that it sounded like blocks falling downstairs, but in slow motion. But half his class took this as seriously as they took everything else, and asked him for weeks afterward about prepared pianos, tone-clusters, and the compositions of John Cage and Henry Cowell; one girl finally brought him a lovely silk-screen reproduction of a painting by Jackson Pollock, and was just opening her mouth to — He interrupted, bewilderingly, by asking the Lord what land He had brought him into. The girl stared at him open-mouthed, and he at once said apologetically that he was only quoting Mahler, who had also diedt from America; then he gave her such a winning smile that she said to her roommate that night, forgivingly: “He really is a nice old guy. You never would know he’s famous.” “Is he really famous?” her roommate asked. “I never heard of him before I got here. ...”
...there is in this world no line so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.
Butter not only wouldn’t melt in this mouth, it wouldn’t go in; one runs away, an urchin in the gutter and glad to be, murmuring: “The Queen of Spain has no legs.” … One’s eyes widen; one sits the poet down in the porch swing, starts to go off to get her a glass of lemonade, and sees her metamorphosed before one’s eyes into a new Critique of Practical Reason.., feminine gender...