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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
Like
Melodrama
Reads
Usually
History
Even
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What is man but his passion?
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Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
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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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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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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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Tell me a story of deep delight.
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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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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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Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
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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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You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
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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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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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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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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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My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.
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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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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
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
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
