Quotes by Robert Penn Warren

There was the bulge and the glitter, and there was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though somebody had laid hold of something in there, in the dark which is you, with a cold hand in a cold rubber glove. It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but dont open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel theres an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little fetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows whats in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little fetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesnt want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing.

The best luck always happens to people who dont need it.

Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the perfection of nonbeing. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticism of Thing in its thingness. Then where do you get anything to say? Then where do you get off?

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 cant get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

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.

You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with a stranger whose mind seems to whet and sharpen your own and with whom a wonderful new vista of ideas is spied. Or you share some intense or painful experience with somebody, and discover a deep communion. Then afterward you are sure that when you meet again, the gay companion will give you the old gaiety, the brilliant stranger will stir your mind from its torpor, the sympathetic friend will solace you with the old communion of spirit. But something happens, or almost always happens, to the gaiety, the brilliance, the communion. You remember the individual words from the old language you spoke together , but you have forgotten the grammar. You remember the steps of the dance, but the music isn’t playing any more. So there you are.

A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the street and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. the voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The voices he hears are loud. they are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. but there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back.

There aint 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 aint built that way.

Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep.

(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. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone’s to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.

No, the Boss corrected, Im not a lawyer. I know some law. ... but Im not a lawyer. Thats why I can see what the law is like. Its like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There aint ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbones to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different.

For what blessing may a man hope for butAn immortality inThe loving vigilance of death.

So there are two yous, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two yous are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldnt be any difference between the two yous or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.

But I dont know, in the end, what deserts, chasms, achievements, virtues, and beauties have to do with love. We can love for so many different, and paradoxical, qualities in the object of our love--for strength or for weakness, for beauty or for ugliness, for gaiety or for sadness, for sweetness or for bitterness, for goodness or for wickedness, for need or for impervious independence. Then, if we wonder from what secret springs in ourselves gushes our love, our poor brain goes giddy from speculation, and we wonder what is all meaning and worth. Is it our own need that makes us lean toward and wish to succor need, or is it our strength? What way would our strength, if we had it, incline our heart? Do we give love in order to receive love, and even in the transport or endearment carry the usurers tight-lipped and secret calculation, unacknowledged even by ourselves? Or do we give with an arrogance after all, a passion for self-definition? Or do we simply want a hand, any hand, a human object, to clutch in the dark on the blanket, and fear lies behind everything? Do we want happiness, or is it pain, pain as the index of reality, that we, in the chamber of our heart, want?Oh, if I knew the answer, perhaps then I could feel free.

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.

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 you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. IT is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thars gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

In the last analysis, be always of whatever truth you would live.For fire flames but in the heart of a colder fire.All voice is but echo caught from a soundless voice.Height is not deprivation of valley, nor defect of desire,But defines, for the fortunate, that joy in which all joys should rejoice.

But for the present I would lie there and know I didnt 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.

The poem is a little myth of mans capacity of making his life meaningful. And in the end the poem is not a thing we see - it is rather a light by which we may see - and what we see is life.

What is man but his passion?