Carolina QuotesI have trouble knowing what to do at parties. Prisoners tame mice, or make rings out of spoons: I analyze people’s handwriting...or else ask you to tell me what you read when you were a child. (People speak unusually well of the books of their childhood, don’t they? Or is this one more life-giving illusion?) I love to see a hard eye grow soft over Little Women... And, I’ve found, there’s no children’s book so bad that I mind your having liked it: about the tastes of dead children there is no disputing.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“Speaking of Books”, p. 219
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 219
Cite this record
“I have trouble knowing what to do at parties. Prisoners tame…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-40D3EBA1E0. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/40d3eba1e0
More from Randall Jarrell
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.
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. The child has not yet had the chance to know what it is like to be a grownup; he believes, even, that being a grownup is a mistake he will never make — when he grows up he will keep on being a child, a big child with power. So the child and grownup live in mutual love, misunderstanding, and distaste. Children shout and play and cry and want candy; grownups say Ssh! and work and scold and want steak. There is no disputing tastes as contradictory as these. It is not just Mowgli who was raised by a couple of wolves; any child is raised by a couple of grownups. Father and Mother may be nearer and dearer than anyone will ever be again — still, they are members of a different species. God is, I suppose, what our parents were; certainly the ogre of the stories is so huge, so powerful, and so stupid because that is the way a grownup looks to a child. Grownups forget or cannot believe that they seem even more unreasonable to children than children seem to them.
We never step twice into the same Auden. — HERACLITUS