Best Quotes by Robert Penn Warren (Top 10)
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Tell me a story of deep delight.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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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
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The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
Robert Penn Warren
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It is a human defect—to try to know one's self by the self of another.
Robert Penn Warren
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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
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
Robert Penn Warren
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Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
Robert Penn Warren
More Robert Penn Warren Quotes
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If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.
Robert Penn Warren
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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I longed to know the world's name.
Robert Penn Warren
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Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.
Robert Penn Warren
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Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Robert Penn Warren
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The past is always a rebuke to the present.
Robert Penn Warren
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For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
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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
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More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
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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
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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.
Robert Penn Warren