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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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Robert Penn Warren
Age: 84 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 24
Died: 1989
Died: September 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Guthrie
Kentucky
Accept
Accepting
Future
Cannot
Past
Without
Burden
More quotes by Robert Penn Warren
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Robert Penn Warren
History is all explained by geography.
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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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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
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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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The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
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If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.
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The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
Robert Penn Warren
What is man but his passion?
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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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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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Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
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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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More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
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Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
Robert Penn Warren
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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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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I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Robert Penn Warren
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Robert Penn Warren
