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

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
Damnation
Lack
Modern
History
Sense
World

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I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
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The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
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Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
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Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
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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.
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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.
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For whatever you live is 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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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?
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The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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There was nothing particularly wrong with them they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
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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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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)
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A young man's ambition - to get along in the world and make a place for himself - half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.
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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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