Quote

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.

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
Much
Made
Price
Make
Choice
Always
Cost
Men
Choices
Politics
Doesn
Matter

More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

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What is man but his passion?
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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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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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The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
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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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How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
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It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
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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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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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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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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
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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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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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You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.
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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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There was nothing particularly wrong with them they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
Robert Penn Warren
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To be an American is not...a matter of blood it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.
Robert Penn Warren