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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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Robert Penn Warren
Age: 84 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 24
Died: 1989
Died: September 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Guthrie
Kentucky
Grandly
Recedes
Emerson
Predicted
Becomes
Future
History
Past
More quotes by Robert Penn Warren
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
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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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Everything seems an echo of something else.
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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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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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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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For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren
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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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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How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
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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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It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
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Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
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You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
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History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
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...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
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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.
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My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.
Robert Penn Warren
Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
Robert Penn Warren
For whatever you live is life.
Robert Penn Warren
