Robert Penn Warren Quotes:

The end of man is knowledge, but there is 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.

source: - Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.14, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Knowledge, Men, Ends

Everything seems an echo of something else.

source: - Robert Penn Warren, John Burt (1998). “The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren”, p.325, LSU Press

Topics: Echoes

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

source: - "Vision and Leadership in Sustainable Development". Book by Chris Maser, 1999.

Topics: History, World, Damnation

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.

Topics: History, Historical, Littles

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

Topics: Men, Doe, Relation

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

Topics: Real, Writing, Want

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.

source: - 1958 In the Saturday Review, 22 Mar.

Topics: Meaningful, Men, Light, What Is Poetry, Great Poetry

I longed to know the world's name.

Topics: Names, World

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

Topics: Thinking, Engineering, Ideas, Social Engineering

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.

source: - Robert Penn Warren (1996). “All the King's Men”, p.372, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Devil, Students, Complicated

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

source: - Robert Penn Warren (1989). “New and selected essays”, Random House Inc

Topics: Writing, Confusion, Fiction

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

Topics: Meaningful, Men, Poetry

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

source: - Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.656, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Past, Accepting, Burden

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Topics: Writing, Scratches, Annoying, Itching

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?

Topics: Happiness, Self, Substance, Selflessness, New Self

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

Topics: Happiness, Thinking, Facts

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.

Topics: Country, Growing Up, Blood

Tell me a story of deep delight.

source: - Robert Penn Warren, John Burt (1998). “The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren”, p.267, LSU Press

Topics: Delight, Stories, Storytelling

It is a human defect--to try to know one's self by the self of another.

Topics: Self, Trying, Defects

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.

Topics: Mother, Father, Trying

In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

Topics: Spring, Thinking, America, Polo

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.

Topics: Time, Practice, May

What is man but his passion?

Topics: Passion, Men, Enthusiasm

In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.

Topics: Mean, Writing, Thinking, One Deep

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

Topics: History, Melodrama

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.

Topics: Pain, Writing, Firsts

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Topics: Self, Poetry, Understanding, Self Understanding

History is all explained by geography.

Topics: Geography

This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from the other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principal.

Topics: Real, Past, Identity, Future Events

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

Topics: Real, Goes On, Matter

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

source: - Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.391, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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.

Topics: Distance, Past, History

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

Topics: Writing, Essence, Capture

For life is a fire burning along a piece of string--or is it a fuse to a powder keg which we call God?--and the string is what we don't know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man's Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man's Knowledge will be equal to God's Knowledge and there won't be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be blown completely away.

Topics: Ignorance, Men, Wind, Kegs, Fire Burning

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

Topics: Reality, Past, Events

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

source: - Robert Penn Warren, Floyd C. Watkins, John T. Hiers (1980). “Robert Penn Warren talking: interviews, 1950-1978”, Random House (NY)

Topics: Past, History, Rebuke

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) "There is always something." And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge." And he said, "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.

Topics: Night, Men, Judging, Sped, Shrouds

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

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)

Topics: Kings, Men, Sin

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.

Topics: Long, Waiting, Too Much

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.

Topics: Boys, Mad, Laughing

[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.

Topics: Responsibility, House, Awful

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 speak its name. / Tell me a story of deep delight.

Topics: Distance, Names, Stories

...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?

Topics: Lying, Self, Justice, New Self

Dirt's a funny thing,' the Boss said. 'Come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and that's dirt too. It's dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?

Topics: Blessed, Thinking, Funny Things

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.

Topics: People, Relation, Term

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.

Topics: Men, Choices, Cost

I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

Topics: Hurt, Real, Book, Hinges

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

Topics: Garden, Garbage, Ordinary

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.

Topics: Summer, Being In Love, Love Is

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.

source: - Robert Penn Warren (1996). “All the King's Men”, p.593, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Men, Judging, Soul

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

Topics: Past

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

Topics: Writing, Glory, Nancy

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

Topics: Moving, May, Vices

America was based on a big promise--a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house, that's quite a problem--particularly when you've got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America--you see, that saddle's going to jump now and then and it pricks.

Topics: Children, Self, America, Burrs

If a man knew how to live he would never die.

Topics: Life, Men

Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel. . . not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, "What do I really feel about this?

Topics: Thinking, Trying, Asking

In separateness only does love learn definition.

Topics: Doe, Definitions

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.

Topics: Men, Special, Penance

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.

Topics: Men, Way, Dignity, Anything Worth Doing

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

Topics: Goodness, Badness

Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?

Topics: Dying, Handle

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.

Topics: People, Luck, Needs

A young man's ambition is 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.

Topics: Ambition, Men, Age

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

Topics: People, Sensitive, Poet

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.

Topics: Want, Messages, Poet

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

Topics: Men, Soul

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

Topics: Light, Poetry, May

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

Topics: Prisoner

For whatever you live is life.

There is no country but the heart.

Topics: Country, Heart

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

Topics: Smart, Way, Smart Aleck

For the truth is a terrible thing.

Topics: Truth Is, Terrible, Terrible Things

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

Topics: Blood, Ideas, Matter

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.

Topics: Jewels, Toads, Crystals, Ruffles, Fracture

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 excercise 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.

Topics: Life, Men, Animal, Technical Skills

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.

Topics: Fear, Sleep, What If, Vectors

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.

Topics: Lying, Blessed, Eye, Dark Night Of The Soul

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

Topics: Poetry, Grows

The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

source: - Robert Penn Warren (1961). “The Legacy of the Civil War”, p.100, U of Nebraska Press

Topics: Common Humanity, Giving, Understanding

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.

source: - Robert Penn Warren, “Tell Me A Story”

Topics: Distance, Names, Delight, Starlight

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

source: - "All the King's Men".

Topics: Self, Trying, Defects

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

source: - "Newsweek" Magazine, August 25, 1980.

Topics: Two, Amusement, Easy, Inexpensive

A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.

Topics: Heart, Intellect, Symbols

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.

source: - The New York Times, June 2, 1981.

Topics: Ambition, Men, Age

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

source: - Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.192, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Rain, Night, Car

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.

source: - Robert Penn Warren, Floyd C. Watkins, John T. Hiers (1980). “Robert Penn Warren talking: interviews, 1950-1978”, Random House (NY)

Topics: Stories

Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.

source: - Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.60, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Summer, Girl, Dream, Annie, Big Girl

...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.

source: - Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.50, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Morning, Heart, Light, Street Corners, Morning After

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.

source: - Robert Penn Warren (2006). “All the King's Men”, p.342, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Love, Life, Believe