Carolina QuotesRuskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“An Unread Book”, p. 47
- work
- The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
- year
- 1969
- locator
- p. 47
Cite this record
“Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work o…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-2F6D63CFB9. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/2f6d63cfb9
More from Randall Jarrell
Somewhere there must be Something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of — think of me!
We read our mail and counted up our missions — In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school — Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, "Our casualties were low." They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.
...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it...