Robert Penn Warren quotes - page 2

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)
Accept these images for what they are - Out of the past a fragile element Of substance into accident. I would speak honestly and of a full heart; I would speak surely for the tale is short, And the soul's remorseless catalogue Assumes its quick and piteous sum. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
For fire flames but in the heart of a colder fire. All voice is but echo caught from a sound-less voice. Height is not deprivation of valley, nor defect of desire. But defines, for the fortunate, that joy in which all joys should rejoice. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
She never came back. The family Sort of drifted off. Nobody wears shiny boots like that now. But I know she is beautiful forever, and lives In a beautiful house, far away. She called my name once. I didn't even know she knew it. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
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. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
What glass unwinking gives our trust Its image back, what echo names The names we hurl at namelessness? View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
How could I exist in the same world with that brightness? Two years later she smiled at me. She Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Then let us turn now - you to me And I to you - and hand to hand Clasp, even though our fable be Of strangers met in a strange land Who pause, perturbed, then speak and know That speech, half lost, can yet amaze Joy at the root; then suddenly grow Silent, and on each other gaze. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
I know that any discussion of the relation of this poem to its historical materials is, in one perspective, irrelevant to its value; and it could be totally accurate as history and still not worth a dime as a poem. I am trying to write a poem, not a history, and therefore have no compunction about tampering with non-essential facts. But poetry is more than fantasy and is committed to the obligation of trying to say something, however obliquely, about the human condition. Therefore, a poem dealing with history is no more at liberty to violate what the writer takes to be the spirit of his history than it is at liberty to violate what he takes to be the nature of the human heart. What he takes those things to be is, of course, his ultimate gamble. (Robert Penn Warren)
Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
[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. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
It is a human defect--to try to know one's self by the self of another. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Tell me a story of deep delight. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard The great geese hoot northward. I could not see them, there being no moon And the stars sparse. I heard them. I did not know what was happening in my heart. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
If a man knew how to live he would never die. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
But to poetry - You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. 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. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
I cannot recall what I started to tell you, but at least I can say how night-long I have lain under the stars and Heard mountains moan in their sleep. (Robert Penn Warren)
There are a lot of people who would make better citizens if they were content to be just negatively relevant. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. It was real blood, not tomato catsup or the pale ectoplasm of statistics, that wet the ground at Bloody Angle and darkened the waters of Bloody Pond. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
If, in the middle of World War II, a general could be writing a poem, then maybe I was not so irrelevant after all. Maybe the general was doing more for victory by writing a poem than he would be by commanding an army. At least, he might be doing less harm. View quote
Robert Penn Warren
At night They remember, however, that there is something they cannot remember. So moan.Their's is the perfected pain of conscience that Of forgetting the crime, and I hope you have not suffered it. I have. View quote
Robert Penn Warren