Robert Penn Warren

For the truth is a terrible thing.

— Robert Penn Warren

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

— Robert Penn Warren

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

— Robert Penn Warren

If a man knew how to live he would never die.

— Robert Penn Warren

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

— Robert Penn Warren

A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.

— Robert Penn Warren

There is no country but the heart.

— Robert Penn Warren

History is all explained by geography.

— Robert Penn Warren

“a friend of your youth is the only friend you ever have..”

— Robert Penn Warren

There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain.

— Robert Penn Warren

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

— Robert Penn Warren

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

— Robert Penn Warren

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

— Robert Penn Warren

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

— Robert Penn Warren

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

— Robert Penn Warren

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.

— Robert Penn Warren

“For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second…

— Robert Penn Warren

“He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world…

— Robert Penn Warren

So little time we live in Time, And we learn all so painfully, That we may spare this hour's term To practice…

— Robert Penn Warren

“But, the stultifying lingo aside, the question I raise is a vital one for us all, we are all stuck with trying…

— Robert Penn Warren

“You are dehydrated," I said. "The result of alcohol taken in excess. But that is the only way to take it. It…

— Robert Penn Warren

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

A young man's ambition is to get along in the world and make a place for himself-half your life goes that way,…

— Robert Penn Warren

In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying…

— Robert Penn Warren

Tell me a story. / In this century, and moment, of mania, tell me a story. / Make it a story of…

— Robert Penn Warren

The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which…

— Robert Penn Warren

“Against firelight, he sees the face of the woman / Lean over, and the lips purse sweet as to bestow a kiss,…

— Robert Penn Warren

“All items listed above belong in the world In which all things are continuous, And are parts of the original dream which…

— Robert Penn Warren

“I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the…

— Robert Penn Warren

“It is hard to remember.” “Remember what?” “All that goes into the making of any one moment we live. There are things…

— Robert Penn Warren

“(...) the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light,…

— Robert Penn Warren

“Let us leave in suspension such debates about the economic costs of the War and look at another kind of cost, a…

— Robert Penn Warren

“After a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle…

— Robert Penn Warren

“Now and then a pair of eyes would burn at us out of the dark ahead. I knew that they were the…

— Robert Penn Warren

“What happened was this: I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and…

— Robert Penn Warren

“We can grant, too, that for social problems to be diagnosed, some detachment from society is necessary…But social problems are rarely to…

— Robert Penn Warren

“At first it was, as I have said, rather bracing and tonic. For after the dream there is not reason why you…

— Robert Penn Warren

“For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little…

— Robert Penn Warren

“I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in…

— Robert Penn Warren

I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around…

— Robert Penn Warren