Robert Penn Warren Quotes - Page 3

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• 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

  Spring, Thinking, Knitting

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• You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Stories

  Robert Penn Warren, Floyd C. Watkins, John T. Hiers (1980). “Robert Penn Warren talking: interviews, 1950-1978”, Random House (NY)

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• Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Summer, Girl, Dream

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.60, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Men, Judging, Soul

  Robert Penn Warren (1996). “All the King's Men”, p.593, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Dirt's a funny thing,' the Boss said. 'Come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and that's dirt too. It's dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?

  Robert Penn Warren

  Blessed, Thinking, Funny Things

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.69, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Long, Waiting, Want

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.102, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from the other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principal.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Real, Past, Identity

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.578, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• ...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

  Robert Penn Warren

  Lying, Self, Justice

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• I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. 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... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Hurt, Real, Book

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Poetry, Want, Messages

  "The Themes of Robert Frost". Lecture, 1947.

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• 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

  Funny, Money, People

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• If a man knew how to live he would never die.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Life, Men, Dies

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.531, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Fear, Sleep, Math

  Robert Penn Warren, John Burt (1998). “The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren”, p.128, LSU Press

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• There is no country but the heart.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Country, Heart

  Robert Penn Warren (1964). “Flood A romance of Our Time”

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• 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

  Jewels, Ruffles, Steel

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.26, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• ...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Morning, Heart, Light

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.50, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Summer, Being In Love, Love Is

  Robert Penn Warren (2002). “All the King's Men”, p.563, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Robert Penn Warren

  Poetry, Poetic, Grows

  1985 In the New York Times, 12 May.

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• What is man but his passion?

  Robert Penn Warren

  Passion, Men, Enthusiasm

  Robert Penn Warren, John Burt (1998). “The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren”, p.254, LSU Press

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• It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) "There is always something." And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge." And he said, "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.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Night, Men, Judging

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.286, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Country, Growing Up, Blood

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• But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Lying, Blessed, Eye

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.150, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Love, Life, Believe

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.342, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Smart, Way, Smart Aleck

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.363, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Past, Reality, Events

  Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.578, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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