186 Quotes by Robert Penn Warren

And right is a lid you put on something and some of the things under the lid look just like some of the things not under the lid, and there never was any notion of what was right if you put it down on folks in general that a lot of them didn’t start squalling because they just couldn’t do any human business under that kind of right.

But old Mr. Sandeen, who was the father of one of the dead kids, saw him back in the crowd and while the clods were still bouncing off the coffin lids Mr. Sandeen pushed back to him and grabbed him by the hand and lifted up one arm above his head and said, loud, “Oh, God, I am punished for accepting iniquity and voting against an honest man!

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

We all knew the great lesson of history; I from reading it and they from living it. And the lesson is: it is more blessed to kill than to be killed.

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.

The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.

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

I have known time and distance, but not why I am here.

I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the earth leaned on its axis and shouldered the spot I occupied a little out of the direct, billowing, crystalline, consuming blaze of the enormous sun.