Quotes by Robert Penn Warren

About Robert Penn Warren:

Robert Penn Warren is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Beauty Is the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic. If, after several Applications, you do not find Relief, consult your family physician

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 is the only way to do a man any good.

Robert Penn Warren

...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, ...

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 down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of change has been used up. You adjust yourself, and are...

Robert Penn Warren

We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very mu...

Robert Penn Warren

There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't built that way.

Robert Penn Warren

So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the oldfield pines encroach. It is where you go when...

Robert Penn Warren

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

Robert Penn Warren

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

So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't...

Robert Penn Warren

(The law) is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hel...

Robert Penn Warren

No, the Boss corrected, I'm not a lawyer. I know some law. ... but I'm not a lawyer. That's why I can see what the law is like. It's like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain't ever enough blanke...

Robert Penn Warren

I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more v...

Robert Penn Warren

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

Robert Penn Warren

If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head.

Robert Penn Warren

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

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...

Robert Penn Warren

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

Robert Penn Warren

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

He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.

Robert Penn Warren

I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear.

Robert Penn Warren

Author Bio

  • NameRobert Penn Warren
  • DescriptionAmerican poet, novelist, and literary critic
  • BornApril 24, 1905
  • DiedSeptember 15, 1989
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Author; Novelist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program; Rome Prize; Bollingen Prize; National Medal Of Arts; Pulitzer Prize For Poetry; National Book Award