Carolina QuotesThe ways we miss our lives are life.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
"A Girl in a Library," line 92
- work
- The Seven-League Crutches (1951)
- year
- 1951
Cite this record
“The ways we miss our lives are life.” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-65FB8952F7. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/65fb8952f7
More from Randall Jarrell
The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything — I am being sympathetic, not satiric — for the very best reasons.
The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E.E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse of parts of speech, his use of negative prefixes, his word-coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and syntax don’t permit us to relate — all this makes him a magical bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp.
Gertrude knew better than this, of course, but we all know better than we know better, or act as if we did.