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You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.

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
Chooses
Choose
Story
Stories

More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

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For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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There was nothing particularly wrong with them they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
Robert Penn Warren
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More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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For whatever you live is life.
Robert Penn Warren
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The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
Robert Penn Warren
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I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Robert Penn Warren
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Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
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.
Robert Penn Warren
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
Robert Penn Warren
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What is man but his passion?
Robert Penn Warren
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Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel. . . not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, What do I really feel about this?
Robert Penn Warren