Carolina Quotes...we like somebody who succeeds with such bad conscience, and who seems to wish that he had the nerve to be a failure or, better still, something to which the terms success and failure don’t apply — as when Mallory said, about Everest: “Success is meaningless here.”
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“ ‘Very Graceful Are the Uses of Culture’ ”, p. 206
- work
- Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
- year
- 1935
- locator
- p. 206
Cite this record
“...we like somebody who succeeds with such bad conscience, a…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-EAB649A1CE. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/eab649a1ce
More from Randall Jarrell
Goethe said, “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: “I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.” These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
A bat is born Naked and blind and pale. His mother makes a pocket of her tail And catches him. He clings to her long fur By his thumbs and toes and teeth. And then the mother dances through the night Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting — Her baby hangs on underneath.
And the world said, Child, you will not be missed. You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road; Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you: Man is the judgment of the world.