Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Penn Warren
Age: 84 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 24
Died: 1989
Died: September 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Guthrie
Kentucky
Bears
Crystals
Toad
Meaning
Leafs
Fracture
Strange
Scarcely
Willow
Point
Leaf
Toads
Moments
Jewels
Jewel
Life
Breeze
Forehead
Like
Passes
Crystal
Changeful
Steel
Foreheads
Ruffles

More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

Image
What is man but his passion?
Robert Penn Warren
Image
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
Image
You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
Image
Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
History is all explained by geography.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Everything seems an echo of something else.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
Image
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
Image
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
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
Image
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.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
For whatever you live is life.
Robert Penn Warren
Image
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Robert Penn Warren