4 Randall Jarrell Quotes on Style

Randall Jarrell quotes on style

44. Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say 'perhaps' or 'I don't know,' so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.

46. Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, 'That's what it means to have a style'; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, 'It is a style that no subject can change.'

54. His dogmatism is more wild and personal than we are accustomed to, completely unspoiled by the hedging 'equanimity' that weakens the style and temperament of so many of our serious writers. His murderous intuitive phrases are famous; but at the same time his mind is essentially conservative and takes as much joy in rescuing the reputation of a sleeping good writer as in chloroforming a mediocre one.

55. Your tenderness and terrorization, your prose sentences - like Bernini graves, staggeringly expensive, Italianate, warm, sentences once-and-for-all.