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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.
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
Look
Looks
Thing
Changes
Think
Looking
Thinking
Happiness
Fact
Facts
More quotes by Robert Penn Warren
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
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.
Robert Penn Warren
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
Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
Robert Penn Warren
Everything seems an echo of something else.
Robert Penn Warren
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Robert Penn Warren
If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.
Robert Penn Warren
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
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.
Robert Penn Warren
There was nothing particularly wrong with them they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
Robert Penn Warren
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
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.
Robert Penn Warren
Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
Robert Penn Warren
You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
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.
Robert Penn Warren
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
Robert Penn Warren
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.
Robert Penn Warren
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.
Robert Penn Warren
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
Robert Penn Warren
