Quotes from Robert Penn Warren

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.

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

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

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)

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

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.

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

For whatever you live is life.

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

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.

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

For whatever you live is life.

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

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.

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.

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

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

[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.

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.

In separateness only does love learn definition.

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

What is man but his passion?

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

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)