Top 100 Robert Penn Warren Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “History is all explained by geography.”

— Robert Penn Warren

2. “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

3. “The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.”

— Robert Penn Warren

4. “What is man but his passion?”

— Robert Penn Warren

5. “Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?”

— Robert Penn Warren

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

— Robert Penn Warren

7. “Tell me a story of deep delight.”

— Robert Penn Warren

8. “There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.”

— Robert Penn Warren

9. “In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don’t mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.”

— Robert Penn Warren

10. “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

11. “There is no country but the heart.”

— Robert Penn Warren

12. “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

13. “What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There’s never need to fear Violence of the poor world’s abstract storm.”

— Robert Penn Warren

14. “For whatever you live is life.”

— Robert Penn Warren

15. “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

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

— Robert Penn Warren

17. “The best luck always happens to people who don’t need it.”

— Robert Penn Warren

18. “It is a human defect – to try to know one’s self by the self of another.”

— Robert Penn Warren

19. “We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?”

— Robert Penn Warren

20. “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

21. “How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.”

— Robert Penn Warren

22. “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

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

— Robert Penn Warren

24. “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

25. “The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger.”

— Robert Penn Warren

26. “The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know.”

— Robert Penn Warren

27. “The past is always a rebuke to the present.”

— Robert Penn Warren

28. “The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him.”

— Robert Penn Warren

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

— Robert Penn Warren

30. “And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.”

— Robert Penn Warren

31. “And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.”

— Robert Penn Warren

32. “A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.”

— Robert Penn Warren

33. “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

34. “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.”

— Robert Penn Warren

35. “A young man’s ambition is 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

36. “The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful.”

— Robert Penn Warren

37. “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...”

— Robert Penn Warren

38. “Process as process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the deed which is good. The morally good agent may perform the deed which is bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.”

— Robert Penn Warren

39. “In separateness only does love learn definition.”

— Robert Penn Warren

40. “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

41. “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

42. “They say the drowning man relives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and black velvet nights. It took me seventy-eight hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California.”

— Robert Penn Warren

43. “Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time back, we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far away?”

— Robert Penn Warren

44. “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

45. “I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.”

— Robert Penn Warren

46. “I longed to know the world’s name.”

— Robert Penn Warren

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

— Robert Penn Warren

48. “For the truth is a terrible thing.”

— Robert Penn Warren

49. “Duffy was face to face with the margin of mystery where all our calculations collapse, where the stream of time dwindles into the sands of eternity, where the formula fails in the test tube, where chaos and old night hold sway and we hear the laughter in the ether dream.”

— Robert Penn Warren

50. “Lois looked edible, and you know it was tender all the way through, a kind of mystic combination of filet mignon and a Georgia peach aching for the tongue and ready to bleed gold.”

— Robert Penn Warren