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There was nothing particularly wrong with them they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.

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
Particularly
Garden
Ordinary
Wrong
Human
Humans
Nothing
Garbage
Variety

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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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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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If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.
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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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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.
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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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It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
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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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Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
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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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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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How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
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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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What is man but his passion?
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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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The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
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In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.
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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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You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
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