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

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Everything seems an echo of something else.
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History is all explained by geography.
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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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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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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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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
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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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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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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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Tell me a story of deep delight.
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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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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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Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
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How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
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The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
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Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
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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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What is man but his passion?
Robert Penn Warren