Carolina QuotesLending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I still don’t know a better novel than Crime and Punishment — still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depresses him; besides that, he didn’t believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“An Unread Book”, p. 50
- work
- The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
- year
- 1969
- locator
- p. 50
Cite this record
“Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-D3C117B6BD. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/d3c117b6bd
More from Randall Jarrell
The new masters paint a subject as they please, And Veronese is prosecuted by the Inquisition For the dogs playing at the feet of Christ, The earth is a planet among galaxies. Later Christ disappears, the dogs disappear: in abstract Understanding, without adoration, the last master puts Colors on canvas, a picture of the universe In which a bright spot somewhere in the corner Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth.
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.
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.