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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How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
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For whatever you live is life.
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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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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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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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The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
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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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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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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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Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
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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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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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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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It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
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The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
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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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