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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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Robert Penn Warren
Age: 84 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 24
Died: 1989
Died: September 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Guthrie
Kentucky
Thing
Paid
Much
Takes
Long
Waiting
Something
Getting
Else
Happens
Become
Nothing
Wanting
More quotes by Robert Penn Warren
How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.
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For whatever you live is life.
Robert Penn Warren
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
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Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
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If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
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The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
Robert Penn Warren
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Robert Penn Warren
If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.
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The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
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For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
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More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
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It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
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Perhaps he had to be close in order to keep a reason for the things he did. To make the things he did be themselves Life. And not merely a delightful exercise of technical skill which man had been able to achieve because he, of all the animals, had a fine thumb. Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life.
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How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
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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.
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The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
Robert Penn Warren
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.
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