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

More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

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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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The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
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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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You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
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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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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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Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
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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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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
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Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)
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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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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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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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The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
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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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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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Tell me a story of deep delight.
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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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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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For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
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