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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

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
Melodrama
Reads
Usually
History
Even
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For whatever you live is life.
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You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
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The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
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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 poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
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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.
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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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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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How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
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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.
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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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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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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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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
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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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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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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 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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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.
Robert Penn Warren