Life & Wisdom Quote by Randall Jarrell

Jarrell’s line turns hospitality into a warning. “Entertain” is the polite verb: you invite an idea in, offer it a drink, let it talk too much, then show it the door. “Take it home,” by contrast, is intimate, domestic, irreversible. In one clean switch from salon to household, Jarrell sketches the danger of confusing intellectual curiosity with lifelong allegiance.

The intent isn’t anti-ideas; it’s anti-possession. Jarrell, a poet-critic who watched midcentury America harden into ideological camps, is allergic to beliefs that stop behaving like thoughts and start acting like family members: always present, hard to contradict, increasingly entitled. The subtext is that the mind’s virtue lies in its ability to host contradictions without marrying them. An idea can be brilliant and still be a bad roommate.

The phrasing also slyly punctures a modern temptation: to treat every compelling argument as an identity upgrade. Jarrell suggests a more provisional dignity - you can flirt with an idea, even be moved by it, without converting your life into its evidence. That’s an ethics of reading and listening as much as politics: try things on, notice what they do to you, and resist the romance of permanence.

Context matters. Writing in an era of manifestos, Cold War certainties, and literary dogmas, Jarrell offers a poet’s corrective to the age’s clenched fists. The sentence is light on its feet because it’s pushing against heaviness - the weight of convictions that, once “home,” rearrange the furniture of your conscience and call it destiny.