Top 100 Robert Penn Warren Quotes
#1. Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
Robert Penn Warren
#2. Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Robert Penn Warren
#3. I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the earth leaned on its axis and shouldered the spot I occupied a little out of the direct, billowing, crystalline, consuming blaze of the enormous sun.
Robert Penn Warren
#4. Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel ... not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, What do I really feel about this?
Robert Penn Warren
#5. Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.
Robert Penn Warren
#6. A young man's ambition is to get along in the world and make a place for himself-half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.
Robert Penn Warren
#7. More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
#8. Dying
shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?
Robert Penn Warren
#10. I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make a future.
Robert Penn Warren
#11. There was only the sound of the July-flies, which seems to be inside your head like it is the grind and whirr of the springs and cogs which are you and which will not stop no matter what you say until they are good and ready.
Robert Penn Warren
#12. You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.
Robert Penn Warren
#13. Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
Robert Penn Warren
#14. For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
#15. Lois looked edible, and you know it was tender all the way through, a kind of mystic combination of filet mignon and a Georgia peach aching for the tongue and ready to bleed gold.
Robert Penn Warren
#16. If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.
Robert Penn Warren
#19. What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm.
Robert Penn Warren
#20. I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism
that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.
Robert Penn Warren
#21. For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal's own hand and every man is suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.
Robert Penn Warren
#22. Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
#23. All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.
Robert Penn Warren
#24. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.
Robert Penn Warren
#25. Any act of pure perception is a feat, and if you don't believe it, try it sometime. But
Robert Penn Warren
#26. How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.
Robert Penn Warren
#27. If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.
Robert Penn Warren
#29. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.
Robert Penn Warren
#30. A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.
Robert Penn Warren
#31. Beauty
Is the fume-track of necessity. This thought
Is therapeutic.
If, after several
Applications, you do not find
Relief, consult your family physician
Robert Penn Warren
#32. Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something
(All The King's Men)
Robert Penn Warren
#34. A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.
Robert Penn Warren
#35. She lifted her sewing and bit off the thread in the way women do to make your flesh crawl.
Robert Penn Warren
#36. Upon my return I found the call in my box. It was Anne's number, then Anne's voice on the wire, and, as always, the little leap and plunk in my heart like a frog jumping into a lily pool. With the ripples spreading round.
Robert Penn Warren
#37. [A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.
Robert Penn Warren
#38. I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore
Robert Penn Warren
#39. Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time back, we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far away?
Robert Penn Warren
#40. The Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness combined to heal the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife ...
Robert Penn Warren
#41. The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.
Robert Penn Warren
#42. So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for Eternity.
Robert Penn Warren
#46. I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Robert Penn Warren
#47. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of. I had got hold of the
Robert Penn Warren
#48. I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear.
Robert Penn Warren
#49. Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
Robert Penn Warren
#50. To wake in some dawn and see / As though down a rifle barrel, lined up / Like sights, the self that was, the self that is, and there / Far off but in range, completing that alignment, your fate.
Robert Penn Warren
#51. ... they always gave good reasons for the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were.
Robert Penn Warren
#52. My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.
Robert Penn Warren
#53. The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
Robert Penn Warren
#54. You live through ... that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History.
Robert Penn Warren
#55. That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is.
Robert Penn Warren
#56. And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It's
Robert Penn Warren
#57. In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.
Robert Penn Warren
#58. There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't built that way.
Robert Penn Warren
#59. If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head.
Robert Penn Warren
#60. She always stood so trim and erect, and you had the feeling that all her grace and softness was caught in the rigor of an idea which you could not define.
Robert Penn Warren
#61. Process as process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the deed which is good. The morally good agent may perform the deed which is bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.
Robert Penn Warren
#62. I turned around to face the reality, which was not something caught in the ice of the mind but was something now flushed, feline, lethal, and electric ...
Robert Penn Warren
#63. Tell me a story. / In this century, and moment, of mania, tell me a story. / Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. / The name of the story will be time, / But you must not speak its name. / Tell me a story of deep delight.
Robert Penn Warren
#64. In America they have to know just what you are
novelist, poet, playwright ... Well, I've been all of them ... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.
Robert Penn Warren
#65. He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.
Robert Penn Warren
#69. I'm not denying there's got to be a notion of right to get business done, but by God, any particular notion at any particular time will sooner or later get to be just like a stopper put tight in a bottle of water and thrown in a hot stove the way we kids used to do at school to hear the bang. The
Robert Penn Warren
#70. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different. Do
Robert Penn Warren
#71. You are dehydrated," I said. "The result of alcohol taken in excess. But that is the only way to take it. It is the only way to do a man any good.
Robert Penn Warren
#72. In a way, the very success which the Boss laid on Tiny was his revenge on Tiny, for every time the Boss put his meditative, sleepy, distant gaze on Tiny, Tiny would know, with a cold clutch at his fat heart, that if the Boss should crook a finger there wouldn't be anything but the whiff of smoke.
Robert Penn Warren
#73. Goodness ... You got to make it out of badness ... Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.
Robert Penn Warren
#74. I thought God cannot be Fullness of Being. For Life is Motion.
For Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of Being, we would worship Death, the Father.
Robert Penn Warren
#75. Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.
Robert Penn Warren
#76. But he was saying, '
and so I'm not going to make any speech
' In his old voice, his own voice. Or was that his voice? Which was his true voice, which one of all the voices, you would wonder.
Robert Penn Warren
#77. The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
Robert Penn Warren
#78. For meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important.
Robert Penn Warren
#79. It is a human defect
to try to know one's self by the self of another.
Robert Penn Warren
#80. The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.
Robert Penn Warren
#81. I don't care about anybody being handsome", she said, "but I never did go for anybody that reminded me of a box of spilled spaghetti. All elbows and dry rattle.
Robert Penn Warren
#82. Suddenly his face wasn't twitching. It was smooth as a baby's & peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes momentarily make a face look peaceful & pure.
Robert Penn Warren
#83. I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.
Robert Penn Warren
#84. There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
Robert Penn Warren
#87. And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.
Robert Penn Warren
#91. You don't write poems sitting at a typewriter; you write them swimming or climbing a mountain or walking.
Robert Penn Warren
#92. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
Robert Penn Warren
#93. But I knew how the play would come out. This was like a dress rehearsal after the show has closed down.
Robert Penn Warren
#94. Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff ... Willie, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they'll love it and come back for more, but, for heaven's sakes, don't try to improve their minds.
Robert Penn Warren
#95. I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.
Robert Penn Warren
#96. The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
Robert Penn Warren
#97. [T]here is nothing brighter, crisper, more antiseptic, and cooler than a really first-rate corner drugstore on a hot summer night. If Anne Stanton is inside the door and the air conditioning is working.
Robert Penn Warren
#98. The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
Robert Penn Warren
#99. If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it ... if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.
Robert Penn Warren
#100. For what blessing may a man hope for but
An immortality in
The loving vigilance of death.
Robert Penn Warren
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