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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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Robert Penn Warren
Age: 84 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 24
Died: 1989
Died: September 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Guthrie
Kentucky
Thinking
Idea
Engineering
Easy
Curse
Social
Solve
Next
Election
America
Drug
Ideas
Greatest
Everything
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More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

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Tell me a story of deep delight.
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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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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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
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The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
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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The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
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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More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
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Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
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
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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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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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Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
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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.
Robert Penn Warren