186 Quotes by Robert Penn Warren

In America they have to know just what you are – novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I’ve been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It’s not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

I ought to have guessed that a person like her – a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us – I ought to have guessed that that kind of person would not be surprised into answering a question she didn’t want to answer.

The wind would come down a thousand miles and pound on the house and the sash would rattle and inside him something would be big and coiling slow and clotting till he would hold his breath and the blood would beat in his head with a hollow sound as though his head were a cave as big as the dark outside. He wouldn’t have any name for what was big inside him. Maybe there isn’t any name.

I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore.

I didn’t answer right away, and she came across to the writing table, moving quick and nervous, the way she always did, inside of a shapeless shoddy-blue summer suit that she must have got by walking into a secondhand store and shutting her eyes and pointing and saying, “I’ll take that.

She kept her looks very well and continued, in a rather severe way, to pay attention to her dress. There were moments now when her laugh sounded a little hollow and brittle, the laughter of nerves not of mirth or good spirits. Occasionally in a conversation she seemed to lose track and fall into a self-absorption, to start up overwhelmed by embarrassment and unspoken remorse... She was pushing thirty-five. But she could still be good company.