Robert Penn Warren Quotes

69 Sourced Quotes

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Robert Penn Warren
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
The poem is, then, a little myth of man's capacity for 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
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Robert Penn Warren
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
Dying—shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?

Robert Penn Warren
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
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
Below all silken soil-slip, all crinkled earth-crust, Far deeper than ocean, past rock that against rock grieves, There at the globe's deepest dark and visceral lust, Can you hear the groan-swish of magma as it churns and heaves?

Robert Penn Warren
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
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
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
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

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

Robert Penn Warren
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
If anybody's going to be a writer, he's got to be able to say, "This has got to come first, to write has to come first." That is, if you have a job, you have to scant your job a little bit. You can't be an industrious apprentice if you're going to be a poet. You've got to pretend to be an industrious apprentice but really steal time from the boss. Or from your wife, or somebody, you see. The time's got to come from somewhere. And also this passivity, this "waitingness," has to be achieved some way. It can't be treated as a job. It's got to be treated as a non-job or an anti-job.

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. By daylight,
They remember nothing, and go about their lawful occasions
Of not going anywhere except in slow disintegration. 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.

Robert Penn Warren
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
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
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
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
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
You can't make bricks without straw, and most of the time all the straw you got is secondhand from the cowpen.

Robert Penn Warren
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 pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.

Robert Penn Warren
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
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
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
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
Such fable ours! However sweet,
That earlier hope had, if fulfilled,
Been but child's pap and toothless meat
— And meaning blunt and deed unwilled,
And we but motes that dance in light
And in such light gleam like the core
Of light, but lightless, are in right
Blind dust that fouls the unswept floor

For, no: not faith by fable lives,
But from the faith the fable springs
— It never is the song that gives
Tongue life, it is the tongue that sings;
And sings the song. Then, let the act
Speak, it is the unbetrayable
Command, if music, let the fact
Make music's motion; us, the fable.

Robert Penn Warren
They were human, they suffered, wore long black coat and gold watch chain.
They stare from daguerrotype with severe reprehension,
Or from genuine oil, and you'd never guess any pain
In those merciless eyes that now remark our own time's sad declension.

Robert Penn Warren