Quotes from Robert Penn Warren

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

History is all explained by geography.

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

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.

All items listed above belong in the world In which all things are continuous, And are parts of the original dream which I am now trying to discover the logic of. This Is the process whereby pain of the past in its pastness May be converted into the future tense Of joy. I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision (1974)

If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head.

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.

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.

you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History.

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

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

For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge into darkness. For there is a blackness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall into the Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that.

What is love?/One name for it is knowledge.

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?

I longed to know the world's name.

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.

The law) is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain't ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone's to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.

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.