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

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
Relation
Dies
Words
Doe
Men

More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel. . . not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, What do I really feel about this?
Robert Penn Warren
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
Robert Penn Warren
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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
Robert Penn Warren
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But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. 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.
Robert Penn Warren
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More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
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I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Robert Penn Warren
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I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.
Robert Penn Warren
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Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
Robert Penn Warren
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Tell me a story of deep delight.
Robert Penn Warren
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The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
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My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.
Robert Penn Warren
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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 relation to other people.
Robert Penn Warren
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For whatever you live is life.
Robert Penn Warren
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Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Robert Penn Warren
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If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.
Robert Penn Warren
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The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
Robert Penn Warren