Quotes from Robert Penn Warren

I didn't answer right away, and she came across to the writing table, moving quick and nervous, the way she always did, inside of a shapeless shoddy-blue summer suit that she must have got by walking into a secondhand store and shutting her eyes and pointing and saying, "I'll take that.

I don't care about anybody being handsome, she said, but I never did go for anybody that reminded me of a box of spilled spaghetti. All elbows and dry rattle.

You don't write poems sitting at a typewriter; you write them swimming or climbing a mountain or walking.

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.

they always gave good reasons for the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were.

Oh, Anne, why did you do it?     It was the one question I had never meant to ask.     For a moment she did not answer. Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice, He wasn't like anybody else. Not anybody else I'd ever known. And I love him. I love him, I guess. I guess that is the reason.     I sat there and reckoned I had asked for that one.

Good-bye, Lois, and I forgive for you everything I did to you.

She cleared them out, and fast. The car went off down the gravel road with the springs flat on the rear axle and human flesh oozing out the windows, then the evening quiet descended upon us.

YOUNG: Self-appointed advisors have taken this line about Negro responsibility almost solely, and these are the very people who in the past have been largely indifferent to the plight of the Negro citizen, they've been people who fought against civil rights. I'm thinking of columnists like David Lawrence and Fulton Lewis. Now these are the people who speak of Negroes' assuming certain responsibilities before these rights are to be given.

Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time back, we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far away?

Duffy was face to face with the margin of mystery where all our calculations collapse, where the stream of time dwindles into the sands of eternity, where the formula fails in the test tube, where chaos and old night hold sway and we hear the laughter in the ether dream.

I turned around to face the reality, which was not something caught in the ice of the mind but was something now flushed, feline, lethal, and electric...

He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be different. To be dead, he thought, that was to know that nothing would ever be different.

Suddenly his face wasn't twitching. It was smooth as a baby's and peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes momentarily make a face look peaceful and pure.

I remember distinctly the retarded, inexorable grind of the gravel under the iron tires, a sound that seemed to declare some irreversible process in which we were trapped, as though we were coffee beans dropped in a coffee grinder as big as the world.

We all knew the great lesson of history; I from reading it and they from living it. And the lesson is: it is more blessed to kill than to be killed.

He saw a light come on, far off there, in one of the houses clutching at the shadowy base of the hill. He thought of the human moment in the midst of the land. His heart stirred. He thought of the preciousness of that moment. That, he thought, was all he had ever tried to get: that moment of preciousness. But he had never managed to do it. At least, not the way he dreamed it. Perhaps he would, this time.

I know nothing I'm doing is important,' he said. 'Sure, I'm just a waste product of history. Maybe nothing I'm doing is even real, after all. But I was born right here, in this old house, and I look out the window and know what I'm seeing, and I know some people I like to be with, and I like what I do all day long, and maybe that's all that realness is, anyway

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. In the end they just ask you those crappy little questions.

The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name, which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger…the Friend of Your Youth is your friend because he does not see you anymore.

I ought to have guessed that a person like her—a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us—I ought to have guessed that that kind of a person would not be surprised into answering a question she didn't want to answer. Even

I'd be (...) lying there on my back with my clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette smoke flow up slow and splash against the ceiling like the upside-down slow-motion moving picture of the ghost of a waterfall or like the pale uncertain spirit rising up out of your mouth on the last exhalation, the way the Egyptians figured it, to leave the horizontal tenement of clay in its ill-fitting pants and vest.

For everything there is a season / But there is the dream / Of a season past all seasons.

The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different. Do