Robert Penn Warren Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.

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

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

Robert Penn Warren
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Robert Penn Warren
There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain.

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

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

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

Robert Penn Warren
What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.

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

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

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

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

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

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
To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, the day we went up.

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
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
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
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