Quotes by Robert Penn Warren

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

“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 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 that does not exist anymore, speaks a name Spike, Bud, Snip, Red, Rusty, ...”

“A civil war is, may we say, the prototype of all war, for in the persons of fellow citizens who happen to be the enemy we meet again, with the old ambivalence of love and hate and with all the old ...”

“Let us leave in suspension such debates about the economic costs of the War and look at another kind of cost, a kind more subtle, pervasive, and continuing, a kind that conditions in a thousand way...”

“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.”

“BeautyIs the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic.If, after severalApplications, you do not findRelief, consult your family physician”

“And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace”

“We can grant, too, that for social problems to be diagnosed, some detachment from society is necessaryBut social problems are rarely to be solved by men totally outside of society certainly not by...”

“During all that time I didn't see Willie. I didn't see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the...”

“The struggle for power conducted along logical lines is much more likely to occur in smoke-filled rooms than at the polls. The party system is a grid, a filter, a meat chopper, through which issues...”

“That old unionism was, however, very different from the kind we live with now. We do not live with an ideal, sometimes on the defensive, of union. We live with the overriding, overwhelming fact, a ...”

“Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.”

“...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner...”

“I know nothing Im doing is important,' he said. 'Sure, Im just a waste product of history. Maybe nothing Im doing is even real, after all. But I was born right here, in this old house, and I look o...”

“For example. But I cannot give you an example. It was not so much any one example, any one event, which I recollected which was important, but the flow, the texture of the events, for meaning is ne...”

“I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I a...”

“They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in rel...”

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