Robert Penn Warren Quotes

69 Sourced Quotes

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

Robert Penn Warren
On this matter of criticism, something that appalls me is the idea going around now that the practice of criticism is opposed to the literary impulse—is necessarily opposed to it. Sure, it may be a trap, it may destroy the creative impulse, but so may drink or money or respectability. But criticism is a perfectly natural human activity, and somehow the dullest, most technical criticism may be associated with full creativity.

Robert Penn Warren
My ambitions were purely scientific, but I got cured of that fast by bad instruction in freshman chemistry and good instruction in freshman english.

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
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
Perhaps he had to be close in order to keep a reason for the things he did. To make the things he did be themselves Life. And not merely a delightful exercise of technical skill which man had been able to achieve because he, of all animals, had a fine thumb. Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life.

Robert Penn Warren
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
In silence the heart raves. It utters words
Meaningless, that never had
A meaning. I was ten, skinny, red-headed,
Freckled. In a big black Buick,
Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat
In front of the drugstore, sipping something
Through a straw. There is nothing like
Beauty. It stops your heart. It
Thickens your blood. It stops your breath. It
Makes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath.
I leaned against a telephone pole, and watched.
I thought I would die if she saw me.

Robert Penn Warren
What glass unwinking gives our trust
Its image back, what echo names
The names we hurl at namelessness?

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.

Robert Penn Warren
Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff...Willie, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they'll love it and come back for more, but, for heaven's sakes, don't try to improve their minds.

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.

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.

Robert Penn Warren
For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal's own hand and every man is suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.

Robert Penn Warren
The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him.

Robert Penn Warren
If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

Robert Penn Warren
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

Robert Penn Warren
Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.

Robert Penn Warren
So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for Eternity.

Robert Penn Warren
If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.

Robert Penn Warren
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
There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.

Robert Penn Warren
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 selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

Robert Penn Warren
A young man's ambition — to get along in the world and make a place for himself — half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.

Robert Penn Warren
My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.

Robert Penn Warren
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

Robert Penn Warren
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

Robert Penn Warren
Ages to our construction went,
Dim architecture, hour by hour:
And violence, forgot now, lent
The present stillness all its power.

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.

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.

Robert Penn Warren