Robert Penn Warren Quotes

There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thin...

So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. ...

. . . for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate ...

There was the bulge and the glitter, and there was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though s...

Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection of inaction, which is peace, just ...

A civil war is, may we say, the prototype of all war, for in the persons of fellow citizens who happ...

Let us leave in suspension such debates about the economic costs of the War and look at another kind...

Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you m...

BeautyIs the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic.If, after severalApplications, you...

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and ...

But I don't know, in the end, what deserts, chasms, achievements, virtues, and beauties have to do w...

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bus...

(The law) is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. ...

No, the Boss corrected, I'm not a lawyer. I know some law. ... but I'm not a lawyer. That's why I ca...

I know nothing I’m doing is important,' he said. 'Sure, I’m just a waste product of history. Maybe n...

But, the stultifying lingo aside, the question I raise is a vital one for us all, we are all stuck w...

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making his life meaningful. And in the end the poem ...

You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner a...

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the lit...

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old...

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiog...

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the ste...

If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head.

What is man but his passion?

you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only y...

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is n...

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glitterin...

For what blessing may a man hope for butAn immortality inThe loving vigilance of death.

For example. But I cannot give you an example. It was not so much any one example, any one event, wh...

The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He s...

That old unionism was, however, very different from the kind we live with now. We do not live with a...

The struggle for power conducted along logical lines is much more likely to occur in smoke-filled ro...

We can grant, too, that for social problems to be diagnosed, some detachment from society is necessa...

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be...

He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the grou...

It is hard to remember.”“Remember what?”“All that goes into the making of any one moment we live. Th...

You are dehydrated," I said. "The result of alcohol taken in excess. But that is the only way to tak...

A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and th...

So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving w...

He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamil...

I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great ma...

During all that time I didn't see Willie. I didn't see him again until he announced in the Democrati...

...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's...

And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace

Furthermore, a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not...

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.

But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness ...

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other peo...

In the last analysis, be always of whatever truth you would live.For fire flames but in the heart of...