Quotes from Robert Penn Warren

Against firelight, he sees the face of the woman / Lean over, and the lips purse sweet as to bestow a kiss, but / This is not true, and the great glob of spit / Hangs there, glittering, before she lets it fall. The spit is what softens like silk the passage of steel / On the fine-grained stone. It whispers.

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

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.

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 the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.

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." "All right," I said.

What you are is an expression of history.

You can't make bricks without straw, and most of the time all the straw you got is secondhand straw from the cowpen.

I couldn't any more have touched her then than if she had been my little sister.

If the human race didn't remember anything it would be perfectly happy.

I did not understand my complex of feeling. Particularly as she was saying, 'Yes, I'm sorry I ever met you. Ever. If I hadn't I wouldn't have to go through this Awfulness, the awfulest part being that I'll remember you. Always.' — Robert Penn Warren, from "Goodbye," Uncollected Poems 1943-1989, The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren , ed. John Burt (Louisiana State University Press, 1998)

under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you felt is taken away from you, too. You bloody fool, do you think that you want to milk a cow? You do not want to milk a cow.

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. There's

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

What you don't 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. I was

it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity […] The human frame just ain't built that way.

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.

Have you ever Stared into the owl's eyes? They blink slow, then burn: Burn gold in the dark inner core of the snow-shrouded cedar.

She always stood so trim and erect, and you had the feeling that all her grace and softness was caught in the rigor of an idea which you could not define.

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 good, and the devil take the hindmost

Everything seems an echo of something else.

But the first one had not been successful. It had not been successful because in the midst of the process I tried to discover the truth and not the facts.

A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.

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