Carolina QuotesA correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
Chapter 2, p. 68
- work
- Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel]
- year
- 1954
- locator
- p. 68
Cite this record
“A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-DCC40496B4. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/dcc40496b4
More from Randall Jarrell
It is G.E. Moore at the spinet.
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.
Some of Mr. Gregory’s poems have merely appeared in The New Yorker; others are New Yorker poems: the inclusive topicality, the informed and casual smartness, the flat fashionable irony, meaningless because it proceeds from a frame of reference whose amorphous superiority is the most definite thing about it — they are the trademark not simply of a magazine but of a class.