Carolina QuotesIt is rare for a novel to have an ending as good as its middle and beginning...
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“An Unread Book”, p. 25
- work
- The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
- year
- 1969
- locator
- p. 25
Cite this record
“It is rare for a novel to have an ending as good as its midd…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-66619C7669. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/66619c7669
More from Randall Jarrell
...when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as “a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows”, he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.
Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets — one they learned at college — and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion.
Since Pharaoh’s bits were pushed into the jaws of kings, these dyings — patient or impatient, but dyings — have happened, by the hundreds of millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die ourselves, but never how to live. Who is “taught to live” by cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death?