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

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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
Point
Leaf
Toads
Moments
Jewels
Jewel
Life
Breeze
Forehead
Like
Passes
Crystal
Changeful
Steel
Foreheads
Ruffles
Bears
Crystals
Toad
Meaning
Leafs
Fracture
Strange
Scarcely
Willow

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It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
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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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The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
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Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
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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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But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.
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If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.
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What is man but his passion?
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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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If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.
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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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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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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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History is all explained by geography.
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Tell me a story of deep delight.
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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.
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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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Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
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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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