"Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and and spoken for the other. A visitor looked under black beams, through leaded casements (past apple boughs, past box, past chairs like bath-tubs on broomsticks) to a lawn ornamented with one of the statues of David Smith; in the months since the figure had been put in its place a shrike had deserted for it a neighboring thorn tree, and an archer had skinned her leg against its farthest spike. On the table in the President’s waiting-room there were copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine — a little magazine — that had no name. One walked by a mahogany hat-rack, glanced at the coat of arms on an umbrella-stand, and brushed with one’s sleeve something that gave a ghostly tinkle — four or five black and orange ellipsoids, set on grey wires, trembled in the faint breeze of the air-conditioning unit: a mobile. A cloud passed over the sun, and there came trailing from the gymnasium, in maillots and blue jeans, a melancholy procession, four dancers helping to the infirmary a friend who had dislocated her shoulder in the final variation of The Eye of Anguish."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesChildren's authorsPeople from Nashville
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 1: “The President, Mrs., and Derek Robbins”, p. 3; opening paragraph of novel
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Randall_Jarrell
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell (6 May 1914 – 15 October 1965) was an American poet, novelist, critic, children's book author and essayist.
213 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Randall Jarrell →
Related Quotes
"The ways we miss our lives are life."
"His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring That leers up, joyless, vile, in meek obscenity — This is the devil. Flesh…"
"For this last savior, man, I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying? Men wash their hands in blood, as best they c…"
"The soul has no assignments, neither cooks Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time. Here in this enclave…"
"It is G.E. Moore at the spinet."
"Somewhere there must be Something that's different from everything. All that I've never thought of — think of me!"
"She would have come from Paradise and complained to God that the apple wasn’t a winesap at all, but a great big pulpy…"
"From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth,…"
"We read our mail and counted up our missions — In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about …"
"Death and the devil, what are these to him? His being accuses him — and yet his face is firm In resolution, in absolu…"