Robert Penn Warren quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Robert Penn Warren has a lot to say. In this list we present the 47 best Robert Penn Warren quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Robert Penn Warren quotes
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
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
The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful.
— Robert Penn Warren
BeautyIs the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic.If, after severalApplications, you do not findRelief, consult your family physician
— Robert Penn Warren, The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren
And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace
— Robert Penn Warren, New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
— Robert Penn Warren
I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
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, All the King’s Men
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
If you want him to do it, you’ve got to change the picture of the world inside his head.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
A civil war is, may we say, the prototype of all war, for in the persons of fellow citizens who happen to be the enemy we meet again, with the old ambivalence of love and hate and with all the old guilts, the blood brothers of our childhood. In a civil war – especially in one such as this when the nation shares deep and significant convictions and is not a mere handbasket of factions huddled arbitrarily together by historical happen-so – all the self-divisions of conflicts within individuals become a series of mirrors in which the plight of the country is reflected, and the self-division of the country a great mirror in which the individual may see imaged his own deep conflicts, not only the conflicts of political loyalties, but those more profoundly personal.
— Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War
Let us leave in suspension such debates about the economic costs of the War and look at another kind of cost, a kind more subtle, pervasive, and continuing, a kind that conditions in a thousand ways the temper of American life today. This cost is psychological, and it is, of course, different for the winner and the loser.
— Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War
The struggle for power conducted along logical lines is much more likely to occur in smoke-filled rooms than at the polls. The party system is a grid, a filter, a meat chopper, through which issues are processed for the consuming public. The Civil War confirmed our preference for this arrangement. We like the fog of politics, with the occasional drama of the flash of a lightning bolt that, happily, is usually nothing more than a near miss.
— Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War
That old unionism was, however, very different from the kind we live with now. We do not live with an ideal, sometimes on the defensive, of union. We live with the overriding, overwhelming fact, a fact so technologically, economically, and politically validated that we usually forget to ask how fully this fact represents a true community, the spiritually significant communion which the old romantic unionism had envisaged.
— Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War
…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, All the King’s Men
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
— Robert Penn Warren
It is hard to remember.”“Remember what?”“All that goes into the making of any one moment we live. There are things one must try to remember. Do you know what is the hardest thing to remember?”“No, ” Adam said.“Well, I’ll tell you, my son, ” Aaron Blaustein said. “The hardest thing to remember is that other men are men.” He leaned to set his cup down. “But that, ” he said, “is the only way you can be a man yourself. Can be anything.
— Robert Penn Warren, Wilderness: A Tale Of The Civil War
Furthermore, a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not merely in experiencing history but in creating it can have no sense of destiny. And what kind of society is it that has no sense of destiny and no sense of self? That has no need or will to measure itself by the record of human achievement and the range of human endowment? And here we may pause to ask what our society measures itself by. Is it only by the ability to gratify immediate appetites, capacity for consumption, and the GNP?
— Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry
But, the stultifying lingo aside, the question I raise is a vital one for us all, we are all stuck with trying to find the meaning of our lives, and the only thing we have to work on, or with, is our past.
— Robert Penn Warren, A Place to Come To
I know nothing I’m doing is important, ‘ he said. ‘Sure, I’m just a waste product of history. Maybe nothing I’m doing is even real, after all. But I was born right here, in this old house, and I look out the window and know what I’m seeing, and I know some people I like to be with, and I like what I do all day long, and maybe that’s all that realness is, anyway
— Robert Penn Warren, A Place to Come To
We can grant, too, that for social problems to be diagnosed, some detachment from society is necessary…But social problems are rarely to be solved by men totally outside of society – certainly not by men not merely outside of a particular society but outside of the very concept of society. For if all institutions are “dirty, ” why really bother to amend them? Destruction is simpler, purer, more logical, and certainly more exciting. Conscience without responsibility – this is truly the last infirmity of noble mind.
— Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War
For example. But I cannot give you an example. It was not so much any one example, any one event, which I recollected which was important, but the flow, the texture of the events, 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. And I was moving. I was moving West at seventy-five miles an hour, through a blur of million-dollar landscape and heroic history, and I was moving back through time into my memory. They say the drowning man re-lives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and black velvet nights. It took me seventy-eight hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men: Restored Edition
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, All the King’s Men
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, All the King’s Men
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
He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be different.To be dead, he thought, that was to know that nothing would ever be different.
— Robert Penn Warren, Wilderness: A Tale Of The Civil War
. . . 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, All the King’s Men
The best luck always happens to people who don’t need it.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the perfection of nonbeing. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticism of Thing in its thingness. Then where do you get anything to say? Then where do you get off?
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
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, All the King’s Men
You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with a stranger whose mind seems to whet and sharpen your own and with whom a wonderful new vista of ideas is spied. Or you share some intense or painful experience with somebody, and discover a deep communion. Then afterward you are sure that when you meet again, the gay companion will give you the old gaiety, the brilliant stranger will stir your mind from its torpor, the sympathetic friend will solace you with the old communion of spirit. But something happens, or almost always happens, to the gaiety, the brilliance, the communion. You remember the individual words from the old language you spoke together , but you have forgotten the grammar. You remember the steps of the dance, but the music isn’t playing any more. So there you are.
— Robert Penn Warren
A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the street and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. the voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The voices he hears are loud. they are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. but there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
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, All the King’s Men
Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
(The law) is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone’s to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
No, the Boss corrected, I’m not a lawyer. I know some law. … but I’m not a lawyer. That’s why I can see what the law is like. It’s like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone’s to the breeze. 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.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
For what blessing may a man hope for butAn immortality inThe loving vigilance of death.
— Robert Penn Warren
So there are two you’s, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you’s are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn’t be any difference between the two you’s or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
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, All the King’s Men
So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the oldfield 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 see 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, All the King’s Men
In the last analysis, be always of whatever truth you would live.For fire flames but in the heart of a colder fire.All voice is but echo caught from a soundless voice.Height is not deprivation of valley, nor defect of desire, But defines, for the fortunate, that joy in which all joys should rejoice.
— Robert Penn Warren, Selected Poems, 1923-1975
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, All the King’s Men
The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making his 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
What is man but his passion?
— Robert Penn Warren
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
— Robert Penn Warren
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
— Robert Penn Warren
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
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