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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.

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
Make
Good

More quotes by 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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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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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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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.
Robert Penn Warren
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Everything seems an echo of something else.
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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For whatever you live is life.
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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You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
Robert Penn Warren
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How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Robert Penn Warren
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I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
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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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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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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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)
Robert Penn Warren